If the organization is secret, how do you know it doesn't exist? The only logical answer is that you're a member of this secret, supposedly non-existent organization, and you're trying to keep us in the dark! So there!
Remind me again how patents are supposed to foster innovation and benefit the economy?
Sure thing. If you invented a device that cures cancer, patches the hole in the ozone layer, and cooks a juicy turkey in under 5 minutes, there's not a company in the world who would touch it if you didn't have a patent. The reason is that without a patent, the company would almost certainly *LOSE* money on the device. Getting a successful product to market requires not just the initial invention, but product development, packaging, market research, advertising, product placement, movie tie-ins, etc. Each of these things requires time, money, and people (i.e., money, money, and more money).
When company A finally releases the product, the list price is significantly higher than the manufacturing cost, because company A has to recoup the costs I just listed. However, if the technology isn't protected by a patent, then company B can come along and release an identical product for only slightly more than the manufacturing cost (since company B didn't have to do any of the ancillary work), undercutting company A and usurping all of the income for the product.
So without a patent, company A does all the work and company B gets all the profit. Clearly, company A isn't going to engage in this kind of business. However, if the invention is protected by a patent, then company B can't undercut company A's prices (or at least, company B has to pay company A for using the technology), so company A can make money by developing the technology. That's how patents foster innovation and benefit the economy.
Hey, I had 2KB of RAM on my Sinclair 1000, and I was never able to use it all up before my brother would 'accidentally' trip over the power cord and wipe out my program. With molecular memory, 2 KB is all you'll be able to use before Brownian motion plays the role of my brother.:-)
Based on the article, this level of sophistication in tracking technology is worth the investment for companies that rake in "$138,889 [in revenue] per hour." Let's compare that to the revenue reports of some of our favorite companies (based on dividing their quarterly revenue by 90 days at 24 hours/day):
Right now, casinos have the advantage that you actually walk into them, and thus can be photographed, recognized, identified by your frequent-loser card, etc. But in terms of revenue, casinos don't even compare to the amount of money tossed around by big business (and open-source companies don't even compare to casinos in terms of revenue). So if you think for a moment that this kind of data mining begins and ends with the small-time players of the gambling industry, think again!
(P.S. Yes, IBM's revenue is larger than Microsoft's. But their net profit is smaller. If you look at their investor info, you can see that the profit margin on software is about 80%, where as that on hardware is about 30%. Add that to the fact that IBM has a R&D department that actually does serious science (i.e., they get published in peer-reviewed journals), and it's easy to understand why IBM's net profits are lower than those of MS).
Ever try to install Windows when you have both IDE and SCSI CD-ROM drives? It just doesn't work. 98, 2000, Me -- for all of them, I've had to disconnect the SCSI devices to install the OS. With RedHat I've had some install problems with newer video cards or mice, and their fallback text-mode install often crashes (it doesn't seem to be as well tested), but at least they *have* a fallback text-mode install... and at least these problems come up before I spend 20 minutes clicking on various installation options, as happens with Windows. Overall, I'd say the installation process for RedHat is more reliable than for Windows. Haven't tried other distros yet.
Hrm, you gotta wonder why no one replied to this. Does that mean no one knows what.NET really is? More important, does anyone have a clue what.NET *ought* to be?
> I think that we should just put a "K" on every possible computer product, thereby claiming it all as our own. Think of it...KAapple, KSun, KIBM, KUnreal, KExcel, KXWindows. As long as we're keeping the lawyers working, we could expand into the real world with KMart and KCar.
Remind me to write commercial software packages called "unt" and "Ock", just to keep people from doing this....
Anybody else remember this godawful show? The BG characters had to pretend to integrate with normal 20th-century humans while really fighting off the Cylon invasion of Earth. I remember in particular one episode where Starbuck got into a wild-west gunfight with a Cylon. Even at the time (I was ten), I remember thinking it was a ripoff of a Trek episode (which, as I realized later, was a ripoff of various other shows of the time).
But what I really want to know is: If they found Earth back in 1980, why the hell did they leave it 20 years later? No, wait, don't answer that....
The point of my original post was *not* (distinctly *not*) to say that it would be a good thing if governments controlled our online identities. Personally, I don't want anyone controlling my online identity but me. And yes, I could (and probably most/.ers could) control it; but my mother couldn't. For that matter, my sister-in-law couldn't. So who would I rather have controlling the information -- the US government, which is restricted by little things like the Constitution and Bill of Rights, or Microsoft, which is restricted by none of those things? I don't think it's a tough choice.
There's an easy way to prevent Microsoft from controlling our identities. Let the government(s) control them instead. They control our identities now, by issuing licenses and passports. When was the last time you tried to buy a bottle of single-malt scotch with your MSCE certificate as ID?
The way to stop Microsoft from controlling our identities is to convince at least one US state government to legislate the online identification of its citizens. Once digital identification is claimed as a right of the states in the US, it's taken out of the hands of M$. That's gotta be a step up, right?
The problem here is library management. Library management is currently handled by ldconfig, ldd, etc. Since ldconfig handles shared library dependences, only one particular version of a library (e.g. libGLU.so.1.3) is available to *any* program that links with libGLU.so, or libGLU.so.1. The problem you run into here is that different programs may require mutually incompatible versions of a particular libary -- but ldd resolves them all to a particular instance of the library. What we need is a version of ldconfig that allows for specific exceptions -- e.g., if ld.so.conf can specify "GnuCash uses/usr/local/lib/gnucash/libc.so.5", then the problems are easy to fix.
Caveat: I haven't looked closely enough at ldconfig to determine if it already does this or not. If it does, good for the developers! If not, adding this functionality would solve some potential problems.
However, I should add that if every linux program installs its own version of shared libraries, then we're no better off than the windows DLL situation....
"Ignore it? Unplug the fridge? No way. Campbell headed back to the store and purchased a pair of power regenerators, which smooth out the electricity coming from the wall socket, and send it in a steady flow straight to his stereo system. Price: $4,000."
Is it me, or did this guy just spend $4000 for a surge protector?
Just to remind you, that book on transmission line theory was written by Bose and Stevens (yes, *that* Bose). And he thinks Monster Cable is funny, too.
Reminds me of a quote I heard once about audiophiles and Monster Cable (unfortunately, I forget who said this): "I'm not saying that they don't hear a difference -- I'm just saying that there is no difference."
IIRC, copyright refers to the instantiation of the work, and not to the intellectual property contained within. So can't we just pipe the laws through 'sed s/the/teh/g' and claim it as a derivative work?
I was really hoping Sullivan would make a bigger deal of this point. If we only allow fair use with certain technologies, then what happens when those technologies are (inevitably) replaced? Should photocopiers be illegal because we can take pictures of book pages (or even copy them by hand)? If the only way to make fair use of a DVD is to videotape it, what happens if the MPAA convinces camcorder manufacturers to include "DVD filtering technology"? It seems like a dangerous precedent to hand the reins of fair use over to the equipment manufacturers.
Excellent post. However, noise floor is not a particularly good measure of what we can and cannot hear. In the case of SDMI, the watermark (based on the article) appears to be a signal added in the 4-8 kHz band. Keep in mind that the highest note on a piano is somewhere near 4 kHz; so even though the "robust" component of the watermark may be audible, it will most likely only slightly alter the timbre of sounds in the average song (and so will probably only be heard by musicians and extreme audiophiles). And the "fragile" component of the watermark (the part that's used to determine if the file has been modified) is specifically designed to be inaudible. From the article, it appears that the "robust" component is equivalent to a slight echo; since most music recordings are deliberately made in rooms with significant echos, even the "robust" component is not likely to be audible. So adding SDMI encoding to your favorite audio file probably won't introduce audible artifacts, unless you're a world-class musician.
In 1633, Galileo was condemned by the Catholic church and subject to house arrest for demonstrating the simple truth that the Earth moves around the Sun. He was forced to publicly recant his claim, but added, "nevertheless, it moves." Although the rest of the world accepted Galileo's evidence (and made significant discoveries as a result), it took the Vatican until 1983 to issue an official apology. Four hundred years later, scientific truth is once again threatened by a powerful organization that refuses to adjust its untenable beliefs ("SDMI is unbreakable") in the face of reality ("SDMI is pretty easy to break"). History has proven time and again that denying the truth puts one at a disadvantage compared to those who accept it. I only hope Prof. Felton continues to make his results available to those willing to listen.
As someone who stares out the window at these buildings every day, I can attest to the fact that the models generated by this system are excellent (I should also point out that, although I met Seth Teller once, I don't recognize any of the other names on the page, so I'm not tooting my own horn). They work great for blocky buildings, which are prevalent around Tech Square, but I'll reserve judgment until I see how well they do with the Stata Center designed by Frank Gehry (which right now is a big hole in the ground, but in a year or two should be an ugly wart on the corner of Vassar St.).
4 or 5 years ago there was a student (Ig) in a nearby lab who designed a CCD camera whose output, rather than being the brightness of the object being imaged, was the motion of that object. Unfortunately I don't think anyone in the AI lab picked up on the design; it would make these sorts of models much easier to generate.
The primary rule of security is never to have a single point of failure. If you allow any VeriSign-signed certificate to wreak havoc over your computer, that's a single point of failure. No form of security is 100% secure (except gelding, but let's not go there). But if you have 5 levels of security, each with a 1% chance of failure, you end up with a 99.99999999% chance of stopping the intrusion (for the mathematically inclined: [1-(0.01)^5]*100% = 99.99999999%; and yes, I naively assumed that failures at each stage would be independent). So requiring V$-accepted certificates, checking the name of the company that issued the cert, verifying the URL, not running random.EXE files, and using a virus checker gets you a long way towards having a system that won't be compromised by a failure like the one reported today.
The problem is that most of these security methods require a certain amount of expertise and paranoia on the part of the user. Although both are easy to develop when the network you maintain's been cracked once or twice, this sort of thinking isn't something that I would expect or even wish of my Mom (not to disparage moms in general - I know several who know more about security than I ever will) or other loved ones. So the real issue is, can we develop multiple, independent levels of security that don't require expertise or paranoia on the part of the user?
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If the organization is secret, how do you know it doesn't exist? The only logical answer is that you're a member of this secret, supposedly non-existent organization, and you're trying to keep us in the dark! So there!
Remind me again how patents are supposed to foster innovation and benefit the economy?
Sure thing. If you invented a device that cures cancer, patches the hole in the ozone layer, and cooks a juicy turkey in under 5 minutes, there's not a company in the world who would touch it if you didn't have a patent. The reason is that without a patent, the company would almost certainly *LOSE* money on the device. Getting a successful product to market requires not just the initial invention, but product development, packaging, market research, advertising, product placement, movie tie-ins, etc. Each of these things requires time, money, and people (i.e., money, money, and more money).
When company A finally releases the product, the list price is significantly higher than the manufacturing cost, because company A has to recoup the costs I just listed. However, if the technology isn't protected by a patent, then company B can come along and release an identical product for only slightly more than the manufacturing cost (since company B didn't have to do any of the ancillary work), undercutting company A and usurping all of the income for the product.
So without a patent, company A does all the work and company B gets all the profit. Clearly, company A isn't going to engage in this kind of business. However, if the invention is protected by a patent, then company B can't undercut company A's prices (or at least, company B has to pay company A for using the technology), so company A can make money by developing the technology. That's how patents foster innovation and benefit the economy.
Go Lance Armstrong!
Hey, I had 2KB of RAM on my Sinclair 1000, and I was never able to use it all up before my brother would 'accidentally' trip over the power cord and wipe out my program. With molecular memory, 2 KB is all you'll be able to use before Brownian motion plays the role of my brother. :-)
Go Lance Armstrong!
Anyone else find it telling that the NM attorney general's name is "Patsy"?
Go Lance Armstrong!
Based on the article, this level of sophistication in tracking technology is worth the investment for companies that rake in "$138,889 [in revenue] per hour." Let's compare that to the revenue reports of some of our favorite companies (based on dividing their quarterly revenue by 90 days at 24 hours/day):
Microsoft: $2,988,888/hr (Q3,2001)
RedHat: $10,374/hr (Q3,2001)
IBM: $9,722,222/hr (Q1,2001)
GE: $14,089,814/hr (Q1,2001)
Corel: $16,666/hr (Q2,2001)
Sony: $27,091,667/hr (Q1,2001)
Right now, casinos have the advantage that you actually walk into them, and thus can be photographed, recognized, identified by your frequent-loser card, etc. But in terms of revenue, casinos don't even compare to the amount of money tossed around by big business (and open-source companies don't even compare to casinos in terms of revenue). So if you think for a moment that this kind of data mining begins and ends with the small-time players of the gambling industry, think again!
(P.S. Yes, IBM's revenue is larger than Microsoft's. But their net profit is smaller. If you look at their investor info, you can see that the profit margin on software is about 80%, where as that on hardware is about 30%. Add that to the fact that IBM has a R&D department that actually does serious science (i.e., they get published in peer-reviewed journals), and it's easy to understand why IBM's net profits are lower than those of MS).
Go Lance Armstrong!
Ever try to install Windows when you have both IDE and SCSI CD-ROM drives? It just doesn't work. 98, 2000, Me -- for all of them, I've had to disconnect the SCSI devices to install the OS. With RedHat I've had some install problems with newer video cards or mice, and their fallback text-mode install often crashes (it doesn't seem to be as well tested), but at least they *have* a fallback text-mode install... and at least these problems come up before I spend 20 minutes clicking on various installation options, as happens with Windows. Overall, I'd say the installation process for RedHat is more reliable than for Windows. Haven't tried other distros yet.
Go Lance Armstrong!
Hrm, you gotta wonder why no one replied to this. Does that mean no one knows what .NET really is? More important, does anyone have a clue what .NET *ought* to be?
Go Lance Armstrong!
Remind me to write commercial software packages called "unt" and "Ock", just to keep people from doing this....
You ARE the Missing Link. Goodbye!
Anybody else remember this godawful show? The BG characters had to pretend to integrate with normal 20th-century humans while really fighting off the Cylon invasion of Earth. I remember in particular one episode where Starbuck got into a wild-west gunfight with a Cylon. Even at the time (I was ten), I remember thinking it was a ripoff of a Trek episode (which, as I realized later, was a ripoff of various other shows of the time). But what I really want to know is: If they found Earth back in 1980, why the hell did they leave it 20 years later? No, wait, don't answer that....
Go Lance Armstrong!
The point of my original post was *not* (distinctly *not*) to say that it would be a good thing if governments controlled our online identities. Personally, I don't want anyone controlling my online identity but me. And yes, I could (and probably most /.ers could) control it; but my mother couldn't. For that matter, my sister-in-law couldn't. So who would I rather have controlling the information -- the US government, which is restricted by little things like the Constitution and Bill of Rights, or Microsoft, which is restricted by none of those things? I don't think it's a tough choice.
You ARE the Missing Link. Goodbye!
There's an easy way to prevent Microsoft from controlling our identities. Let the government(s) control them instead. They control our identities now, by issuing licenses and passports. When was the last time you tried to buy a bottle of single-malt scotch with your MSCE certificate as ID? The way to stop Microsoft from controlling our identities is to convince at least one US state government to legislate the online identification of its citizens. Once digital identification is claimed as a right of the states in the US, it's taken out of the hands of M$. That's gotta be a step up, right?
You ARE the Missing Link. Goodbye!
So if Parisi wants to complain about the band Primus, he'll have to register primussuckssucks.com....
You ARE the Missing Link. Goodbye!
The problem here is library management. Library management is currently handled by ldconfig, ldd, etc. Since ldconfig handles shared library dependences, only one particular version of a library (e.g. libGLU.so.1.3) is available to *any* program that links with libGLU.so, or libGLU.so.1. The problem you run into here is that different programs may require mutually incompatible versions of a particular libary -- but ldd resolves them all to a particular instance of the library. What we need is a version of ldconfig that allows for specific exceptions -- e.g., if ld.so.conf can specify "GnuCash uses /usr/local/lib/gnucash/libc.so.5", then the problems are easy to fix.
Caveat: I haven't looked closely enough at ldconfig to determine if it already does this or not. If it does, good for the developers! If not, adding this functionality would solve some potential problems.
However, I should add that if every linux program installs its own version of shared libraries, then we're no better off than the windows DLL situation....
You ARE the Missing Link. Goodbye!
Um... what's the point of a shared library if it's not shared?
You ARE the Missing Link. Goodbye!
"Ignore it? Unplug the fridge? No way. Campbell headed back to the store and purchased a pair of power regenerators, which smooth out the electricity coming from the wall socket, and send it in a steady flow straight to his stereo system. Price: $4,000." Is it me, or did this guy just spend $4000 for a surge protector?
You ARE the Missing Link. Goodbye!
Just to remind you, that book on transmission line theory was written by Bose and Stevens (yes, *that* Bose). And he thinks Monster Cable is funny, too.
You ARE the Missing Link. Goodbye!
Reminds me of a quote I heard once about audiophiles and Monster Cable (unfortunately, I forget who said this): "I'm not saying that they don't hear a difference -- I'm just saying that there is no difference."
You ARE the Missing Link. Goodbye!
IIRC, copyright refers to the instantiation of the work, and not to the intellectual property contained within. So can't we just pipe the laws through 'sed s/the/teh/g' and claim it as a derivative work?
You ARE the Missing Link. Goodbye!
I was really hoping Sullivan would make a bigger deal of this point. If we only allow fair use with certain technologies, then what happens when those technologies are (inevitably) replaced? Should photocopiers be illegal because we can take pictures of book pages (or even copy them by hand)? If the only way to make fair use of a DVD is to videotape it, what happens if the MPAA convinces camcorder manufacturers to include "DVD filtering technology"? It seems like a dangerous precedent to hand the reins of fair use over to the equipment manufacturers.
You ARE the Missing Link. Goodbye!
Excellent post. However, noise floor is not a particularly good measure of what we can and cannot hear. In the case of SDMI, the watermark (based on the article) appears to be a signal added in the 4-8 kHz band. Keep in mind that the highest note on a piano is somewhere near 4 kHz; so even though the "robust" component of the watermark may be audible, it will most likely only slightly alter the timbre of sounds in the average song (and so will probably only be heard by musicians and extreme audiophiles). And the "fragile" component of the watermark (the part that's used to determine if the file has been modified) is specifically designed to be inaudible. From the article, it appears that the "robust" component is equivalent to a slight echo; since most music recordings are deliberately made in rooms with significant echos, even the "robust" component is not likely to be audible. So adding SDMI encoding to your favorite audio file probably won't introduce audible artifacts, unless you're a world-class musician.
In 1633, Galileo was condemned by the Catholic church and subject to house arrest for demonstrating the simple truth that the Earth moves around the Sun. He was forced to publicly recant his claim, but added, "nevertheless, it moves." Although the rest of the world accepted Galileo's evidence (and made significant discoveries as a result), it took the Vatican until 1983 to issue an official apology. Four hundred years later, scientific truth is once again threatened by a powerful organization that refuses to adjust its untenable beliefs ("SDMI is unbreakable") in the face of reality ("SDMI is pretty easy to break"). History has proven time and again that denying the truth puts one at a disadvantage compared to those who accept it. I only hope Prof. Felton continues to make his results available to those willing to listen.
As someone who stares out the window at these buildings every day, I can attest to the fact that the models generated by this system are excellent (I should also point out that, although I met Seth Teller once, I don't recognize any of the other names on the page, so I'm not tooting my own horn). They work great for blocky buildings, which are prevalent around Tech Square, but I'll reserve judgment until I see how well they do with the Stata Center designed by Frank Gehry (which right now is a big hole in the ground, but in a year or two should be an ugly wart on the corner of Vassar St.). 4 or 5 years ago there was a student (Ig) in a nearby lab who designed a CCD camera whose output, rather than being the brightness of the object being imaged, was the motion of that object. Unfortunately I don't think anyone in the AI lab picked up on the design; it would make these sorts of models much easier to generate.
The primary rule of security is never to have a single point of failure. If you allow any VeriSign-signed certificate to wreak havoc over your computer, that's a single point of failure. No form of security is 100% secure (except gelding, but let's not go there). But if you have 5 levels of security, each with a 1% chance of failure, you end up with a 99.99999999% chance of stopping the intrusion (for the mathematically inclined: [1-(0.01)^5]*100% = 99.99999999%; and yes, I naively assumed that failures at each stage would be independent). So requiring V$-accepted certificates, checking the name of the company that issued the cert, verifying the URL, not running random .EXE files, and using a virus checker gets you a long way towards having a system that won't be compromised by a failure like the one reported today.
The problem is that most of these security methods require a certain amount of expertise and paranoia on the part of the user. Although both are easy to develop when the network you maintain's been cracked once or twice, this sort of thinking isn't something that I would expect or even wish of my Mom (not to disparage moms in general - I know several who know more about security than I ever will) or other loved ones. So the real issue is, can we develop multiple, independent levels of security that don't require expertise or paranoia on the part of the user?