Except that a bunch of moving mirrors doesn't seem like it would be cheaper OR more reliable than what amounts to a small memory chip with part of it's casing removed.
I absolutely agree. A solid state sensor seems like it would be way cheaper than even thinking about moving parts. But... just because it seems like that would be the case doesn't mean it is - If the really clever thing here is fabricating the mirrors, they very well could be cheaper.
the US should work with that government to harmonize the laws.
Harmonizing laws is a really bad plan. That way, every time the law is wrong *everyone* is screwed. If the law is different in two different places, you have a chance you're in the place where you agree with the law; even if you're not, you can move.
No... the world is a much better place with other countries *not* harmonized with US law.
This kneejerk reaction: "Bah! New stuff is worse than old reliable stuff" isn't appropriate for concept prototypes.
I absolutely agree that only proven technology should be rolled out en-mass, but developments like this robot are extremely valuable. Even if it utterly doesn't work, that's fine - they'll still learn a bunch about automatic auditory sensors, single sensor location calculation, and building robots.
As for the tactical utility of this sort of thing - it absolutely can't be replicated by armored vests. Kevlar does *nothing* against a high powered rifle. Even if every soldier always wore the armor necessary to stop a 7.62 mm rifle round cold, it would be heavy and hot, and they'd just get sniped in the face and upper leg more often. The thing that's really annoying about a sniper isn't that they can injure someone; it's that if you run into a sniper moving through an urban setting you're stopped dead until you can figure out where they are - this can really slow down any kind of urban troop movement. With this robot (conceptually), it reduces the sniper to only one shot - then since you know where they are you can take them out and keep going.
Seriously... everything I've heard about "enlightenment" is paramount to "coming to the conclusion that giving up on life is acceptable". You can't accomplish much if you give up, now can you?
That would work... if shingles were really expensive and the mechanism to move the one shingle around at the necessary speed were comparatively cheap. Oh... and you knew that you never needed to block raindrops in two places at the same time.
There are tons of ideas that work great in computerized systems that sound *really stupid* when you think of doing something that seems similar but uses other materials / technology. I mean - consider the mechanism of an ink jet printer from the perspective of a portrait artist who works with pencils...
The RIAA is a consortium of "Music Labels", which each do distribution and marketing. The way it works is this:
An artist signs his copyright over to a music label. In exchange, they agree to give his work wide market exposure and give him a cut of the proceeds. But... the artist has to pay for all the CDs to be made. For the vast majority of musicians (everyone but the superstars) this comes out to somewhere between them ending up *owing* the label a couple thousand dollars to getting enough money in royalties to buy a used car.
It comes out to something like "The artist makes $0.07 for every album sold after the first 20,000".
Yea, that's actually really shitty. If your numbers are accurate, I wouldn't be surprised if we end up seeing better performance out of the Fluendo Applet than Flash Video.
If the votes really aren't within a 95% confidence interval based on the exit polls, that's sketchy. Sure, it should happen periodically, but when it happens at the same time that new (and also sketchy) electronic voting machines are installed, it deserves some investigation. Given the other facts in this situation, I don't really care who got elected - I just want *some* indication that the election system actually has the properties claimed, and that the voting totals are the result of actual voters voting.
Why does the writers bias have *anything* to do with this? They've published a book that makes a mathematical clam. One of the really neat things about mathematical claims is that you can check them.
The author (apparently, I haven't read the book) makes the claim that "There is a statistically significant correlation between the exit poll discrepancies and the placement of electronic voting machines". If that's wrong, you can show it to be wrong. If that's correct, then I'm really interested in one question: Why? The author's bias is really irrelevant.
The concept of corporations has been around for a while, but the concept that corporations have the same rights as human citizens is pretty recent - early 1900's recent. And... it's really not a good plan, because they *are* immortal, and they *are* sociopathic.
You are aware that video is usually *compressed*, right? And you know that if you get really clever about compression, it costs CPU time, right? I sure as hell wouldn't want bigger video files or worse stream quality just so the specific laptop you're using now doesn't have to spin up its fans for video decoding.
Or we could just use that perfectly good fuel in a reactor; I hear people complaining about energy prices enough that it seems like throwing away energy resources is probably a bad idea.
Or just anonymously post their discoveries in a public forum. That's what I'd do at this point... being nice and telling the site admin directly is too risky, and there's no excuse to let security issues just sit unnoticed.
When more HD movies are released they will probably be posted as 2-6GB avi files.
I'm expecting a common release format for HD stuff to be 4.4 gig XviDs. That'll be awesome - noticeably nicer than DVD, and yet it still fits on a DVD+R for archival.
That looks like it's clear and valid, so that solves it. On the other hand, if you just put the BSD license into the documentation without the "his software contains components from XXX which are available under this license" line, the whole thing is probably BSD.
Since the code is still marked with the BSD license, and the BSD license is a copyright license, you can treat any code with the BSD license text on it as if it were licensed *solely* under the BSD license by simply ignoring any other license - you have permission to treat it as BSD licensed code, so the other license doesn't matter - it's not letting you do anything new.
The only question is: If the BSD license text is distributed with a program, does it apply to the whole program?
You realise what you are describing is communism right?
Wait a second... how is me owning my stuff communism?
I own a book, a pen, and a piece of paper. Anything I chose to do in my home with those items is my business. Not only do I have a right to copy text from my book onto my piece of paper with my pen, you don't even have a right to come onto my property to find out that I've done so - much less tell me I can't do it.
Copyright, in the sense of authors having full control over the use of their works, can't exist in a free society. In order to have an enforceable law that would prevent me from copying my book with my pen on my property, there would either have to be a restriction on pens or I'd have to be under constant surveillance in my own home. Those are clearly unacceptable, so copyright law that prevents personal copying is absurd.
What I do in my own time, on my own property, with my own effort is MINE.
I agree. And the minute a copy of your work becomes someone else's property, it's theirs. I own my mind, and all the knowledge within. I own my hard disks, and all the data on them. I own my bookshelf, my books, and all the writings inside. Anything else is an unnatural absurdity.
Any car is going to run lower than spec in real world USA highway driving, because people setting the spec have to pretend that highway driving is 55 mph. That doesn't change the fact that if you get numbers for two cars through the same test procedure those numbers can be compared.
Plug-in hybrids are really nice from a cost / efficiency / environmental perspective. The hybrid cars we're seeing now have marginal to negative cost/benefit advantages, but that's not the point as far as I'm concerned - the point is getting the hybrid engine technology and battery technology into mass production so that plug-in hybrids are easier in a couple years.
If Toyota produced a plug in Prius *today*, they could charge $25,000 for a car that got ~50 mpg *and* didn't use gas at all for the first ~10 miles every day (you can call the electricity free and not be too far off). That's really nice, but it'll still take years to pay off compared to a cheap compact car. The thing is, with all these hybrids in production, battery production will get cheaper. That means that a 2012 plug-in Prius might cost $16,000. At that price, it's a strict win.
On the other hand, the real future of cars is in diesel engines - *possibly* diesel hybrid engines. Oh well, the USA will probably catch up in 10 or 15 years.
The question here is very simple: How should the browser treat a self-signed certificate or a certificate signed by an unknown CA? There are four choices: 1.) Pop up a scary warning 2.) Treat it like a PKI-authenticated page 3.) Treat it like any normal HTTP page. 4.) Give it its own "encrypted/not authenticated" icon.
Option 2 is obviously wrong. The page can't be authenticated cryptographically, so we can't know "for sure" that it's authentic.
Option 3 is better than Option 1: A self signed certificate is slightly *more* secure than an unencrypted connection - it shouldn't be treated as less secure.
Option 4 is the best: It doesn't look the same as a PKI-verified page, but the user can see that a random snoop won't get their webmail password. If the address in the title bar is right, it's probably authentic anyway - DNS spoofing is pretty rare, and if the attacker is doing that you have bigger problems than them reading your webmail.
There's an easier way to get the key *now*, when you have a working HD-DVD player on hand. That means that DRM is worthless for its intended goal of slowing down dedicated pirates.
What I'm talking about is a secondary effect - in the future, when a working HD-DVD player is hard to find, it may become literally *impossible* to get at the data on a HD-DVD disk because of the encryption. So... back to the initial topic of the thread: DRM *is* intrinsically distasteful. It trades away the ability for an archaeologist to access our popular literature for literally *nothing*, since it doesn't even accomplish the stated goal today.
Without AMD, Transmeta, Cyrix, and any other x86 clone manufacturers that failed along the way the CPU market still wouldn't be as bad as you seem to think. You're forgetting about all the other companies that make microprocessors. I hear IBM makes some pretty nice stuff that you could easily run a desktop-grade computer off of. The other company that you shouldn't forget about is Motorola. Beyond that there are around 50 other companies that currently have fabs that you could make a decent microprocessor at.
If Intel hadn't had solid competition in the x86 market, the competition for embedded microprocessors and server processors wouldn't have slowed down one bit. We might be using Power or Sparc today - perhaps 6 months behind on performance for the changeover, perhaps ahead because of the architecture advantages.
Slashdot Mirror
I absolutely agree. A solid state sensor seems like it would be way cheaper than even thinking about moving parts. But... just because it seems like that would be the case doesn't mean it is - If the really clever thing here is fabricating the mirrors, they very well could be cheaper.
Harmonizing laws is a really bad plan. That way, every time the law is wrong *everyone* is screwed. If the law is different in two different places, you have a chance you're in the place where you agree with the law; even if you're not, you can move.
No... the world is a much better place with other countries *not* harmonized with US law.
This kneejerk reaction: "Bah! New stuff is worse than old reliable stuff" isn't appropriate for concept prototypes.
I absolutely agree that only proven technology should be rolled out en-mass, but developments like this robot are extremely valuable. Even if it utterly doesn't work, that's fine - they'll still learn a bunch about automatic auditory sensors, single sensor location calculation, and building robots.
As for the tactical utility of this sort of thing - it absolutely can't be replicated by armored vests. Kevlar does *nothing* against a high powered rifle. Even if every soldier always wore the armor necessary to stop a 7.62 mm rifle round cold, it would be heavy and hot, and they'd just get sniped in the face and upper leg more often. The thing that's really annoying about a sniper isn't that they can injure someone; it's that if you run into a sniper moving through an urban setting you're stopped dead until you can figure out where they are - this can really slow down any kind of urban troop movement. With this robot (conceptually), it reduces the sniper to only one shot - then since you know where they are you can take them out and keep going.
WTF is "enlightenment" and what is it good for?
Seriously... everything I've heard about "enlightenment" is paramount to "coming to the conclusion that giving up on life is acceptable". You can't accomplish much if you give up, now can you?
That would work... if shingles were really expensive and the mechanism to move the one shingle around at the necessary speed were comparatively cheap. Oh... and you knew that you never needed to block raindrops in two places at the same time.
There are tons of ideas that work great in computerized systems that sound *really stupid* when you think of doing something that seems similar but uses other materials / technology. I mean - consider the mechanism of an ink jet printer from the perspective of a portrait artist who works with pencils...
The RIAA is a consortium of "Music Labels", which each do distribution and marketing. The way it works is this:
An artist signs his copyright over to a music label. In exchange, they agree to give his work wide market exposure and give him a cut of the proceeds. But... the artist has to pay for all the CDs to be made. For the vast majority of musicians (everyone but the superstars) this comes out to somewhere between them ending up *owing* the label a couple thousand dollars to getting enough money in royalties to buy a used car.
It comes out to something like "The artist makes $0.07 for every album sold after the first 20,000".
Yea, that's actually really shitty. If your numbers are accurate, I wouldn't be surprised if we end up seeing better performance out of the Fluendo Applet than Flash Video.
If the votes really aren't within a 95% confidence interval based on the exit polls, that's sketchy. Sure, it should happen periodically, but when it happens at the same time that new (and also sketchy) electronic voting machines are installed, it deserves some investigation. Given the other facts in this situation, I don't really care who got elected - I just want *some* indication that the election system actually has the properties claimed, and that the voting totals are the result of actual voters voting.
Why does the writers bias have *anything* to do with this? They've published a book that makes a mathematical clam. One of the really neat things about mathematical claims is that you can check them.
The author (apparently, I haven't read the book) makes the claim that "There is a statistically significant correlation between the exit poll discrepancies and the placement of electronic voting machines". If that's wrong, you can show it to be wrong. If that's correct, then I'm really interested in one question: Why? The author's bias is really irrelevant.
The concept of corporations has been around for a while, but the concept that corporations have the same rights as human citizens is pretty recent - early 1900's recent. And... it's really not a good plan, because they *are* immortal, and they *are* sociopathic.
You are aware that video is usually *compressed*, right? And you know that if you get really clever about compression, it costs CPU time, right? I sure as hell wouldn't want bigger video files or worse stream quality just so the specific laptop you're using now doesn't have to spin up its fans for video decoding.
Or we could just use that perfectly good fuel in a reactor; I hear people complaining about energy prices enough that it seems like throwing away energy resources is probably a bad idea.
Or just anonymously post their discoveries in a public forum. That's what I'd do at this point... being nice and telling the site admin directly is too risky, and there's no excuse to let security issues just sit unnoticed.
Blech. Why not just degrade it down to 1.44 megs so you can fit it on a floppy disk?
I'm expecting a common release format for HD stuff to be 4.4 gig XviDs. That'll be awesome - noticeably nicer than DVD, and yet it still fits on a DVD+R for archival.
That looks like it's clear and valid, so that solves it. On the other hand, if you just put the BSD license into the documentation without the "his software contains components from XXX which are available under this license" line, the whole thing is probably BSD.
Since the code is still marked with the BSD license, and the BSD license is a copyright license, you can treat any code with the BSD license text on it as if it were licensed *solely* under the BSD license by simply ignoring any other license - you have permission to treat it as BSD licensed code, so the other license doesn't matter - it's not letting you do anything new.
The only question is: If the BSD license text is distributed with a program, does it apply to the whole program?
Wait a second... how is me owning my stuff communism?
I own a book, a pen, and a piece of paper. Anything I chose to do in my home with those items is my business. Not only do I have a right to copy text from my book onto my piece of paper with my pen, you don't even have a right to come onto my property to find out that I've done so - much less tell me I can't do it.
Copyright, in the sense of authors having full control over the use of their works, can't exist in a free society. In order to have an enforceable law that would prevent me from copying my book with my pen on my property, there would either have to be a restriction on pens or I'd have to be under constant surveillance in my own home. Those are clearly unacceptable, so copyright law that prevents personal copying is absurd.
I agree. And the minute a copy of your work becomes someone else's property, it's theirs. I own my mind, and all the knowledge within. I own my hard disks, and all the data on them. I own my bookshelf, my books, and all the writings inside. Anything else is an unnatural absurdity.
Isn't that a perfect application for one of these computer-controlled continuously variable transmissions?
Any car is going to run lower than spec in real world USA highway driving, because people setting the spec have to pretend that highway driving is 55 mph. That doesn't change the fact that if you get numbers for two cars through the same test procedure those numbers can be compared.
Plug-in hybrids are really nice from a cost / efficiency / environmental perspective. The hybrid cars we're seeing now have marginal to negative cost/benefit advantages, but that's not the point as far as I'm concerned - the point is getting the hybrid engine technology and battery technology into mass production so that plug-in hybrids are easier in a couple years.
If Toyota produced a plug in Prius *today*, they could charge $25,000 for a car that got ~50 mpg *and* didn't use gas at all for the first ~10 miles every day (you can call the electricity free and not be too far off). That's really nice, but it'll still take years to pay off compared to a cheap compact car. The thing is, with all these hybrids in production, battery production will get cheaper. That means that a 2012 plug-in Prius might cost $16,000. At that price, it's a strict win.
On the other hand, the real future of cars is in diesel engines - *possibly* diesel hybrid engines. Oh well, the USA will probably catch up in 10 or 15 years.
False. It prevents passive eavesdropping attacks.
The question here is very simple: How should the browser treat a self-signed certificate or a certificate signed by an unknown CA? There are four choices: 1.) Pop up a scary warning 2.) Treat it like a PKI-authenticated page 3.) Treat it like any normal HTTP page. 4.) Give it its own "encrypted/not authenticated" icon.
Option 2 is obviously wrong. The page can't be authenticated cryptographically, so we can't know "for sure" that it's authentic.
Option 3 is better than Option 1: A self signed certificate is slightly *more* secure than an unencrypted connection - it shouldn't be treated as less secure.
Option 4 is the best: It doesn't look the same as a PKI-verified page, but the user can see that a random snoop won't get their webmail password. If the address in the title bar is right, it's probably authentic anyway - DNS spoofing is pretty rare, and if the attacker is doing that you have bigger problems than them reading your webmail.
There's an easier way to get the key *now*, when you have a working HD-DVD player on hand. That means that DRM is worthless for its intended goal of slowing down dedicated pirates.
What I'm talking about is a secondary effect - in the future, when a working HD-DVD player is hard to find, it may become literally *impossible* to get at the data on a HD-DVD disk because of the encryption. So... back to the initial topic of the thread: DRM *is* intrinsically distasteful. It trades away the ability for an archaeologist to access our popular literature for literally *nothing*, since it doesn't even accomplish the stated goal today.
Without AMD, Transmeta, Cyrix, and any other x86 clone manufacturers that failed along the way the CPU market still wouldn't be as bad as you seem to think. You're forgetting about all the other companies that make microprocessors. I hear IBM makes some pretty nice stuff that you could easily run a desktop-grade computer off of. The other company that you shouldn't forget about is Motorola. Beyond that there are around 50 other companies that currently have fabs that you could make a decent microprocessor at.
If Intel hadn't had solid competition in the x86 market, the competition for embedded microprocessors and server processors wouldn't have slowed down one bit. We might be using Power or Sparc today - perhaps 6 months behind on performance for the changeover, perhaps ahead because of the architecture advantages.