This is the answer to a question I asked on http://governanceimperative.blogspot.com/. Why do people vote the straight party ticket? Someone here suggested a 'none of the above' which causes a new election if it gets a certain percentage of the votes. I like that idea.
So, it turns out that Mad Max was prophetic. They had refinerys to turn pig waste into fuel. So we started with turkeys, big deal. Does this mean I can start mounting cool weapons on my car? Anyone know where I can get a good deal on a used AutoCannon-10 or maybe refurbished PPC? I'll break out my tool box...
Does anyone wonder why a previously #1 ranked company (Southwest Airlines) isn't even in the top 100 anymore? It's because the application process took so long and involved so many people (voluntarily) that they decided they would rather use those resources to do what they do best, serve their customers, not filling out "pat me on the back" applications.
I'll leave it up to the Slashdot crowd to figure out how useful this may or may not be in the computer security field.
There exists in the real world a document that was encrypted to keep the contents from becoming public and has foiled all known attempts to discover the plaintext. How long has has the security held? Over four hundred years! This remains true dispite efforts by several well qualified experts including the CIA/NSA. The original was donated to Yale and is still there, waiting to be deciphered.
So, it is possible but probably not practical.
What is the name of the document? The Voynich Manuscript.
A short quote from the site:
The Voynich Manuscript has been dubbed 'The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World'.
It is named after its discoverer, the American antique book dealer and collector, Wilfrid M. Voynich, who discovered it in 1912, amongst a collection of ancient manuscripts kept in villa Mondragone in Frascati, near Rome, which had been by then turned into a Jesuit College (closed in 1953).
Putting aside the valid reference to incestuous sex in other works, I fail to see how the above reference is one of them. How does using their ships laser to defend against attack qualify?
What do you mean by "... that particular reference..."?
That argument implies that I'm obligated to view / download all the content from a page just because it is listed in the HTML. Let us say that I created a page with 100MB in pictures of my last vacation. Let us also say that I used bitmaps and every other grossly wasteful format of which I could think. When you try to pull that page up and wonder what is taking so long, are you really trying to imply that you don't have the right to cancel the download? Or are you saying that I have the right to force you to use your data connection contrary to your own interest?
What Junkbusters does is skip loading of images or other linked content if its URL matches a known pattern. How do you get from my declining to allow my browser to follow particular link to theft of service? Did the general public sign a contract that states they agree to view banner ads on any arbitrary site they might visit? What contractual obligation am I under to/.?
When I request a URL, all I'm asking for is to recieve the raw HTML text of a given page. What I do with it once it is on my PC is up to me. What if I want to save it locally and view it later? That falls under "time-shifting"; see the Betamax case from the early 80's. If I want to view it with a text browser, have I stolen some service from/.? If I'm on a dialup connection where I pay per bit, what legal theory do you have that gives/. a right to force me to overuse my connection just because they want to display an image they hope I click?
Here is another analogy. I put up a public billboard with two halves. One half has an ad for some product and the other has the text of some poetry which I wrote. Being proud of my work, I stand next to the billboard and demand that viewers must look at the ad portion before they can read my poetry. Whether the quality of the poetry is that of a Shakespearean sonnet or a dirty limrick, what right do I have over my content when I publish it in a public place? If someone reads the poem but not the ad, what service of mine have they stolen?
Does that mean that CmdrTaco should be grateful when I write a script that crawls through his site and does nothing but generate fake banner hits?
Ok, here's the scoop. H2SO4 is sulfuric acid. The thread I responded to mentioned SO2 and SO3 as being silicate biproducts of vaporizing the rocks in the borehole.
The Web Table of Elements shows silicon's symbol is Si and sulfur is S, so I think he really meant SiO2 and SiO3 otherwise it looked like that laser drill was going to make plenty of nasty sulfuric acid between the water in the drilling mud and the SO2 to which he was incorrectly referring.
I'm flattered that I was the MOST of anything to anybody. It clashes with being mediocre. Darn.
I know this might be wrong, but when I see SO2 near a mention of a powerful laser and water I think of the possibility of creating H2SO4, Sulfuric acid. This doesn't make sense, seing that the SO2 is Silicon and the H2SO4 refers to Sulfur.
I would have to agree with this. The defendants tried to argue that they had a safe harbor under the 'integration' clause of DMCA. The judges ruling of irrelavency was based on his assessment that the software wasn't used to make a Linux DVD player but a Windows DVD decoder.
On a side note, is it possible that the RIAA can convince a judge that the Aimster protocol isn't real encryption? This is somewhat a moot point since they could have picked rot13 or whatever, there isn't a shortage of encryption routines.
Excellent point, very similiar to the Aimster article published earlier. The court case against DeCSS was partially based on the fact that currently DeCSS is only useful to decrypt DVD's so if there was a valid and legal use then possession and hence links to the source become a real 1st amendment issue.
The caveat to this is the original case was also based on the charge that the defendants actually USED DeCSS to decrypt material protected under DCMA and having your own stuff encoded with CSS doesn't change the outcome of that portion of the case.
If you can make an exact (as in bit-for-bit copy) of the Quake CD then it would be awful hard for any pirate hunting patch to differenciate between legal and illegal but perfectly copied installations.
What Maxis has done with The Sims is a better analogy. Making it hard to produce an exact copy puts them in a position of being able to detect valid installs from pirate ones.
How was Hughes able to distinguish a hacked H-card from a non-hacked one. If the non-hacked ones had to accept the same instructions that the hacked ones did, I still haven't seen how they kept the legit H cards from being affected by the ECM.
I wanted to dispute that radar detectors have no legal purpose.
Here is a scenario: A officer of the law doesn't like me and intends to pull me over for 'speeding' as a form of harrassment. I'm driving down the highway maybe with 2 or 3 passengers when my radar detector lights up. When the said officer gets to my window and trys to write me a ticket for doing 20 MPH faster then I was really going, I now have access to evidence to the contrary. Granted, how I present that evidence is a bit tricky as I'm sure Mr. Policeman would be real open to the standard "But I thought I was doing the speed limit!" line. Knowing when his radar was on and using that to double check your speed is a valid defense against townships that use Speed Ambushes as an income source.
I can hear it know, "Don't you mean a Speed Trap?" No, a trap is something you leave and come back to see if it has caught your prey. An ambush is where you sit, usually in hiding, and wait for your prey to come along so you can pounce. So, anytime you see Mr. Radar (or laser) gun on the side of the road, remember, you were *AMBUSHED* not trapped.
But how could they enforce that agreement if I sell my receiver to a third party?
It is the same idea as with 'click-through' license agreements. All I have to do is get a friend or maybe even a minor to actually click the button and don't then I have a good case to say I didn't accecpt the license so I shouldn't be bound by it?
This sounds like a great start for the program. I hope they secured their patent before they went public. I had the chance to write up a similiar patent proposal over a year before they started up. My bad for not following through.
My next point is their payment structure. From what I saw of it, their plan looks very similiar to a Multi-Level Marketing Plan, not unlike Amway's. It is admirable that they want to reward referrals but I'm not sure that they fully researched how people will try to take advantage of this. Maybe they need to reward referrals up to a maximum? That way you get more money from actually doing the processing than by referrals.
For a MLM, Amway's plan makes the most sense, especially compared to some of the stranger plans I've heard of but I'm not sure if it is appropriate as part of the business model for a distributed computing company.
First off, the article is based on unpublished information. It sounded like the Boston Globe was basing its information on a talk given at a seminar that consisted of one persons opinion based on anecdotal evidence. Definately not something strong enough at this point to refute the theories currently being bandied about.
The text you are quoting came from the article's description of how similar features formed on Devon Island in Canada. The explaination for Mars is that a very long time ago, it was warm enough and the atmosphere was thick enough for liquid water and that was when the snow fell to them help form the features in question.
It would seem that they have overlooked a key fact. Scientists that study the geology of other planets and moons have developed models that allow them to determine how old a surface feature is based on how many impact craters the feature has. The more craters in evidence, the older the feature. This model has been used on all the objects in the solar system, Mercury, Luna, Io, Europa, Venus, Ganymede, asteroids, etc. What Mr. Malin found was that the drainage features were relatively undisturbed which indicates relative youth, say anywhere between 100 and 10,000 years old. If the formation of snow in the amounts the article mentioned could not have extisted in the last 100,000 years, it would seem to contradict his theory.
The article also mentioned glaciers and I can not resist mentioning that as far as I know, nobody has ever claimed that glaciers have formed for any length of time on Mars. Glaciers form by the collection of snow over long periods of time which requires an atmosphere thick enough to support precipitation. The evidence so far seems to support a relatively short period of flooding billions of years ago and relative dryness since then. Once a glacier formed, it would have existed for a very long time in the cold air of Mars. On one hand, if it sublimated like CO2 (which H2O doesn't do, of course) and that was why they don't exist anymore, they would have shielded the landscape from impacts and that alone would have already shown up in the images Surveyor has sent back. On the other hand, if the glacier melted, it would have melted relatively slowly and again, there would be evidence of this of which none exists.
Last but not least is one small matter. The features in question have formed on the inside wall of an impact crator. It would seem very unlikely that this would be where a glacier could form. As to areas of snow, because of the age of the features, any snow would have had to have fallen since the crator formed, which isn't supported by the impact record.
SUMMARY:
The Boston Globe needs a better Science editor.
It is the Supreme Court's decision to strike down unconstitutional laws.
I believe that any Federal court can declare a Federal law unconstitutional. State or Federal courts can declare state laws unconstitutional. I'm sure there are juristictional issues, you wouldn't want the traffic judge trying to overturn fraud statutes, for example. It's just that the Supreme Court has the final say.
The point in this case is the judge didn't want to rule on constitutionality himself so he said that DCMA was ok vs the First Amendment and leave it to the losing side to appeal.
I find it hard to believe that his ruling could include linking. How can he keep you from linking to a site in another country? What if a site that doesn't contain DeCSS that 2600 links to puts DeCSS on one of their pages after the fact? Is it 2600's job to verify every link on every page they link to recursively on a daily basis on the off chance that someone starts including DeCSS? How absurd!
I like a phrase I heard around here somewhere , "Anything that can be put on a t-shirt should be considered speech." That doesn't mean it is protected, "fire in a crowded theatre" or obscenity (unlike pornography) but at least is recognized as falling under the auspices of the First Amendment. I haven't read the whole judgement yet but can he keep people from putting DeCSS on a t-shirt and wearing it to court?
As a side note, isn't it strange that cuss words like d*mn and f*ck are said to be "obscenities" while the picture of an unclothed female in a possibly lewd position or pose is pornographic? Stay with me here, the strangeness comes from the community standards rulings that relate back to the First Amendment, things that are considered *Obscene* by the community can be legislatively prohibited, so why is the witchhunt going after plain-ol' naughty pictures instead of all that obscene language? Ain't people the strangest animal? Go figure!
The part in the article that bothers me the most is the claim that gravity hasn't been measured at distances smaller than a millimeter.
I remember reading about an effect that could be measured with a table-top setup. Take to plates and put them really close together. At some distance, they are pushed together without any added force. The explanation was that the photon pressure (or was it some quantum effect?) on the outside surfaces of the plates was larger then the force pushing against the inside surfaces because the gap between the plates was smaller then the wavelength of the ( particle | force ).
Why not measure gravity at sub-millimeter distances by taking two plates, placing them inside a vacuum chamber that is electromagnetically shielded, including light. If you have a mechanism to very slowly push the plates together, you could put something like springs on each plate and measure the pull the springs are exerting(sp). Taking into account any friction, the force used to move the plates closer and the tension the springs create, shouldn't you be able to measure the tension on the springs to see if the plates pull on the springs with extra force at small distances? A millimeter is about how thin a dime is. It's small but we have micrometers that can measure much smaller then that, surely we have devices that can measure very small forces like tension on a spring. All you would need to know for this experiment would be the tension created by the spring along the same distance without the plates to compare with the tension created by the springs with the plates.
I wonder if the same thing is going to happen to these machines that happened to IBM's water-cooled mainframes.
The machines themselves would become obsolete but the cooling mechanism started becoming extremely valuable, sometimes to the point of costing more then the original machine. To keep older machines running after IBM discontinued the line mainframe owners would start searching for old machines to salvage the water-cooling parts. I believe I read that those parts had a very strong auction market for them.
Evidently water-cooling isn't very cost efficient compared to other ways of increasing CPU output. What they are doing now is shrinking the circuits but we already know that Intel can't keep doing that forever. What else is left to squeeze more power out of a given CPU design besides cooling?
My question is, how is the water-vapor circulated around the case and what happens if there is a leak?
The article has an error in it that has caused considerable bias to build up in this discussion.
The article states that what was reported was a 2% reduction in the magnets weight. This is completely FALSE!
The effect that was reported was that things were measured to weigh 2% less when measured in the column directly above the spinning superconductor. The magnets weight was never reported to change. This doesn't mean it doesn't change only that it wasn't the issue.
According to the original experiment, the researchers were looking into non-gravity related phenomenon associated with superconducting magnets. What they noticed was that smoke, which usually drifted down in normal air, was drifting up in the column above the apparatus. The description I read went into some length on the lengths they went to to isolate other factors like air temperature or air currents and the like.
NASA has a group that is trying to duplicate the experiment but have trouble fabricating the large ceramic disks used.
There have been other Doctoral level researchers that have published papers that attempt to come up with a theory to explain the results.
To say that it is "obviously" bogus is to admit to having a closed mind. I would suggest the alternative mindset: "I'll believe it when I see it" When you start to say "What a waste of money" and the like, you are saying that it isn't worth proving that it can't be done, which can only happen if you attempt it.
Leave it to the financial backers to decide if an experiment is "worth it".
Plenty of people told the Wright brothers that they were attempting the impossible. If they had believed their critics, where would we be?
I've heard that JWB got away from the Army and moved to Texas where he lived into the 20th century. He left some papers saying that he really was JWB and had been living under an assumed name the whole time.
Supposedly, the Army had a doctor sign a death certificate without letting him examine the body. The identification was done in twilight. There were some oversights like JWB had brown hair but the body had red hair, etc. The theory is that the Army felt they had to been seen as bringing Lincoln's assassin to justice one way or the other and without JWB alive, they needed a body and a plausible story.
In the book, there is some narration that referres to strange messages that are being transmitted over the public TV channel. It isn't covert but impossible to break without the codebook (code keys).
The message about slashdot posting is more like this. Post a message in public that only the receiver will know what to do with.
Voice your opinon to the MPAA directly
on
A New DeCSS
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· Score: 1
Here is what I'm going to do. I'm going to call the MPAA and let them know, politely, how I feel about their DeCSS actions.
I haven't called yet so I'm assuming that they don't have a person answering that number. Either way, I'll call personally first and then I might record a really long rant as a.wav file so all I have to do is connect to their phone line and then play the file. I'd advise against automating it since there might be laws about computers calling relentlessly after the phone soliciters started using them. In this case I don't think there would be any way to prove that it's a recording but this way you don't bite off more then you're willing to chew.
I got this address from their website. It wasn't in the first few pages but I eventually found it.
I might even spend 2-3 bucks on photocopied postcards send on random days.
Main Office Address:
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) Motion Picture Association (MPA)
15503 Ventura Blvd. Encino, California 91436 (818) 995-6600
Doh! I should have asked my Math-Degree wife to double check my figures. It shows you what I get for thinking that the numbers seemed too low and not double checking the math.
You are very right, their customers are much more sensitive to the price difference then to the availability of software they don't understand or really even use.
I've been looking around their site looking for the line of computers (Destination) and don't see it anymore so now even that revenue stream has dried up. They were working on an Internet Appliance but I think they they won't be able to pull it off.
I used to work for a small company that was a wholly-owned subsidiary of major PC vendor based in the northern plains. MOOoving right along, we did lots of cutting-edge software development with just released or unreleased hardware (translation: bleeding edge, and boy was there a lot of blood).
The main thing that we actually got into production was a large whole-machine interface package for a top-end line of their computers. It took a lot of time and effort and even after it was released it didn't really garner much fanfare in the public arena.
I started to do the math and our Return On Investment(ROI) to see why we were kept around. There were 20-25 people of different sorts. Six or seven developers, two artists, 6 platform guys(hardware or process), 2-4 testers depending on the stage of development, two contractors, a secretary, four managers and one VP. The Pres spot is reserved for a corporate big-wig. When I started to examine their cost structure and their revenue I started to wonder. Taking into account the mix of talent, you could use a round figure like $50,000 a year as an average salary, then add on the Human Resource overhead of 50% you get $75,000. Multiply by 25 and you get $1,875,000 in annual personnel expenses. Add to that facilities cost. The office was maybe 5,000 square feet so at a rate of $2/sq foot that comes to $10K a month or $120K a year. The fractional T-1 might be $1K monthly or $12K. Most other costs, like utilities can be lumped together , I'll just say all other costs total to what the rent amount is, $120K a year. So, we have Salaries: $1,875K Rent: $ 120K T-1: $ 12K Other: $ 120K ------------------- Total: $2,127K
If the model this software was installed on sells 2,000 units a month, costs $4,000 and the gross margin is %20, that means $16,000 a month in gross profit. Say the software is attributed 10% of the gross profit, that would come to $1,600 a month or $19,200 a year. Granted, my percentage figures can't be accurate but I think they are good guesses. According to my numbers this model would have to sell 100 times better then this scenario, or some combination of 100 times between margin, sales and software percentage, for the subsidiary to pay it's own way. Obviously nobody would be willing to fund this kind of startup without some prospect of getting something out of it. A major emphasis was on turning in "Intellectual Property" disclosures, a.k.a, patents, mostly of the software variety. Now, don't get me wrong, they had some really cool stuff but when disclosures are part of the quarterly goals and are listed in your annual review, you get the impression that they are important, not to mention that this was blatently stated numberous times, "patents are a very important part of what we do" (actually paraphrased).
Basically, we were a patent factory. It didn't matter as much if none of our products shipped as long as we were disclosing IP. They liked their products to ship as much as the next guy but it was always a struggle to the the parent company to have a clue how to take advantage of the software we wrote. A somewhat common occurance was that they didn't think of us until it was to late for us to provide them with anything useful.
Where is this leading? I thought you'd never ask. The reality is that unless you have one of those super-important patents, like IBM's scrolling screen patent, your goal as a company is to gather a portfolio of patents to defend yourself against other companies with porfolios of their own. There are two scenarios. The first is the company who is collecting a defensive portfolio, the second is the company who plans on aggressively enforcing a patent. They both are caused by the Patent Office's ignorance and that should be the main focus of our ire.
Now, this is my understanding on patent law. We had the legal guys from corporate come and brief us on the issues and this is what I can remember: In the US, you have 1 year after you publis to submit a patent application. Publishing means anything from a technical article at a conference to including the technology in a shipping product. This is normally not a problem but to be protected internationally, more countries require no public (as in to anybody not bound by a NDA) disclosure until after the application is filed. This means that if you want the broadest protection, you wait until after the application is filed before you make the information public. Another aspect is that patent applications are not available to the public. A patent is only released to the public after the application is accepted. This means that the only way for us to combat stupid patents to to be informed when they are issued and then start a challenge based on prior art that may not have been considered during the application process. The submitter is focussed on getting it issued and the PTO doesn't do much of it's own homework so it's up to the public (usually competitors) to challenge patents.
In closing, if we want to take more control of the patent situation, publish information as soon as it's "discovered" and then keep an eye on any patent that involves the published material and then challenge it if it was applied for AFTER the published date of the article or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the answer to a question I asked on http://governanceimperative.blogspot.com/. Why do people vote the straight party ticket? Someone here suggested a 'none of the above' which causes a new election if it gets a certain percentage of the votes. I like that idea.
So, it turns out that Mad Max was prophetic. They had refinerys to turn pig waste into fuel. So we started with turkeys, big deal.
Does this mean I can start mounting cool weapons on my car? Anyone know where I can get a good deal on a used AutoCannon-10 or maybe refurbished PPC? I'll break out my tool box...
Does anyone wonder why a previously #1 ranked company (Southwest Airlines) isn't even in the top 100 anymore? It's because the application process took so long and involved so many people (voluntarily) that they decided they would rather use those resources to do what they do best, serve their customers, not filling out "pat me on the back" applications.
There are several other sources, some much more wacko than others, so try to consider the source when looking at a given site. Some more links:
voynich site on GeoCities
page of links from geocities Voynich site
Putting aside the valid reference to incestuous sex in other works, I fail to see how the above reference is one of them. How does using their ships laser to defend against attack qualify?
..."?
What do you mean by "... that particular reference
That argument implies that I'm obligated to view / download all the content from a page just because it is listed in the HTML. Let us say that I created a page with 100MB in pictures of my last vacation. Let us also say that I used bitmaps and every other grossly wasteful format of which I could think. When you try to pull that page up and wonder what is taking so long, are you really trying to imply that you don't have the right to cancel the download? Or are you saying that I have the right to force you to use your data connection contrary to your own interest? What Junkbusters does is skip loading of images or other linked content if its URL matches a known pattern. How do you get from my declining to allow my browser to follow particular link to theft of service? Did the general public sign a contract that states they agree to view banner ads on any arbitrary site they might visit? What contractual obligation am I under to /.?
When I request a URL, all I'm asking for is to recieve the raw HTML text of a given page. What I do with it once it is on my PC is up to me. What if I want to save it locally and view it later? That falls under "time-shifting"; see the Betamax case from the early 80's. If I want to view it with a text browser, have I stolen some service from /.? If I'm on a dialup connection where I pay per bit, what legal theory do you have that gives /. a right to force me to overuse my connection just because they want to display an image they hope I click?
Here is another analogy. I put up a public billboard with two halves. One half has an ad for some product and the other has the text of some poetry which I wrote. Being proud of my work, I stand next to the billboard and demand that viewers must look at the ad portion before they can read my poetry. Whether the quality of the poetry is that of a Shakespearean sonnet or a dirty limrick, what right do I have over my content when I publish it in a public place? If someone reads the poem but not the ad, what service of mine have they stolen?
Does that mean that CmdrTaco should be grateful when I write a script that crawls through his site and does nothing but generate fake banner hits?
Ok, here's the scoop. H2SO4 is sulfuric acid. The thread I responded to mentioned SO2 and SO3 as being silicate biproducts of vaporizing the rocks in the borehole.
The Web Table of Elements shows silicon's symbol is Si and sulfur is S, so I think he really meant SiO2 and SiO3 otherwise it looked like that laser drill was going to make plenty of nasty sulfuric acid between the water in the drilling mud and the SO2 to which he was incorrectly referring.
I'm flattered that I was the MOST of anything to anybody. It clashes with being mediocre. Darn.
I know this might be wrong, but when I see SO2 near a mention of a powerful laser and water I think of the possibility of creating H2SO4, Sulfuric acid. This doesn't make sense, seing that the SO2 is Silicon and the H2SO4 refers to Sulfur.
What am I getting mixed up?
I would have to agree with this. The defendants tried to argue that they had a safe harbor under the 'integration' clause of DMCA. The judges ruling of irrelavency was based on his assessment that the software wasn't used to make a Linux DVD player but a Windows DVD decoder.
On a side note, is it possible that the RIAA can convince a judge that the Aimster protocol isn't real encryption? This is somewhat a moot point since they could have picked rot13 or whatever, there isn't a shortage of encryption routines.
Excellent point, very similiar to the Aimster article published earlier. The court case against DeCSS was partially based on the fact that currently DeCSS is only useful to decrypt DVD's so if there was a valid and legal use then possession and hence links to the source become a real 1st amendment issue.
The caveat to this is the original case was also based on the charge that the defendants actually USED DeCSS to decrypt material protected under DCMA and having your own stuff encoded with CSS doesn't change the outcome of that portion of the case.
If you can make an exact (as in bit-for-bit copy) of the Quake CD then it would be awful hard for any pirate hunting patch to differenciate between legal and illegal but perfectly copied installations.
What Maxis has done with The Sims is a better analogy. Making it hard to produce an exact copy puts them in a position of being able to detect valid installs from pirate ones.
How was Hughes able to distinguish a hacked H-card from a non-hacked one. If the non-hacked ones had to accept the same instructions that the hacked ones did, I still haven't seen how they kept the legit H cards from being affected by the ECM.
I wanted to dispute that radar detectors have no legal purpose.
Here is a scenario: A officer of the law doesn't like me and intends to pull me over for 'speeding' as a form of harrassment. I'm driving down the highway maybe with 2 or 3 passengers when my radar detector lights up. When the said officer gets to my window and trys to write me a ticket for doing 20 MPH faster then I was really going, I now have access to evidence to the contrary. Granted, how I present that evidence is a bit tricky as I'm sure Mr. Policeman would be real open to the standard "But I thought I was doing the speed limit!" line. Knowing when his radar was on and using that to double check your speed is a valid defense against townships that use Speed Ambushes as an income source.
I can hear it know, "Don't you mean a Speed Trap?" No, a trap is something you leave and come back to see if it has caught your prey. An ambush is where you sit, usually in hiding, and wait for your prey to come along so you can pounce. So, anytime you see Mr. Radar (or laser) gun on the side of the road, remember, you were *AMBUSHED* not trapped.
But how could they enforce that agreement if I sell my receiver to a third party?
It is the same idea as with 'click-through' license agreements. All I have to do is get a friend or maybe even a minor to actually click the button and don't then I have a good case to say I didn't accecpt the license so I shouldn't be bound by it?
This sounds like a great start for the program. I hope they secured their patent before they went public. I had the chance to write up a similiar patent proposal over a year before they started up. My bad for not following through.
My next point is their payment structure. From what I saw of it, their plan looks very similiar to a Multi-Level Marketing Plan, not unlike Amway's. It is admirable that they want to reward referrals but I'm not sure that they fully researched how people will try to take advantage of this. Maybe they need to reward referrals up to a maximum? That way you get more money from actually doing the processing than by referrals.
For a MLM, Amway's plan makes the most sense, especially compared to some of the stranger plans I've heard of but I'm not sure if it is appropriate as part of the business model for a distributed computing company.
First off, the article is based on unpublished information. It sounded like the Boston Globe was basing its information on a talk given at a seminar that consisted of one persons opinion based on anecdotal evidence. Definately not something strong enough at this point to refute the theories currently being bandied about.
The text you are quoting came from the article's description of how similar features formed on Devon Island in Canada. The explaination for Mars is that a very long time ago, it was warm enough and the atmosphere was thick enough for liquid water and that was when the snow fell to them help form the features in question.
It would seem that they have overlooked a key fact. Scientists that study the geology of other planets and moons have developed models that allow them to determine how old a surface feature is based on how many impact craters the feature has. The more craters in evidence, the older the feature. This model has been used on all the objects in the solar system, Mercury, Luna, Io, Europa, Venus, Ganymede, asteroids, etc. What Mr. Malin found was that the drainage features were relatively undisturbed which indicates relative youth, say anywhere between 100 and 10,000 years old. If the formation of snow in the amounts the article mentioned could not have extisted in the last 100,000 years, it would seem to contradict his theory.
The article also mentioned glaciers and I can not resist mentioning that as far as I know, nobody has ever claimed that glaciers have formed for any length of time on Mars. Glaciers form by the collection of snow over long periods of time which requires an atmosphere thick enough to support precipitation. The evidence so far seems to support a relatively short period of flooding billions of years ago and relative dryness since then. Once a glacier formed, it would have existed for a very long time in the cold air of Mars. On one hand, if it sublimated like CO2 (which H2O doesn't do, of course) and that was why they don't exist anymore, they would have shielded the landscape from impacts and that alone would have already shown up in the images Surveyor has sent back. On the other hand, if the glacier melted, it would have melted relatively slowly and again, there would be evidence of this of which none exists.
Last but not least is one small matter. The features in question have formed on the inside wall of an impact crator. It would seem very unlikely that this would be where a glacier could form. As to areas of snow, because of the age of the features, any snow would have had to have fallen since the crator formed, which isn't supported by the impact record.
SUMMARY:
The Boston Globe needs a better Science editor.
Anyone care to comment on my reasoning or facts?
It is the Supreme Court's decision to strike down unconstitutional laws.
I believe that any Federal court can declare a Federal law unconstitutional. State or Federal courts can declare state laws unconstitutional. I'm sure there are juristictional issues, you wouldn't want the traffic judge trying to overturn fraud statutes, for example. It's just that the Supreme Court has the final say.
The point in this case is the judge didn't want to rule on constitutionality himself so he said that DCMA was ok vs the First Amendment and leave it to the losing side to appeal.
I find it hard to believe that his ruling could include linking. How can he keep you from linking to a site in another country? What if a site that doesn't contain DeCSS that 2600 links to puts DeCSS on one of their pages after the fact? Is it 2600's job to verify every link on every page they link to recursively on a daily basis on the off chance that someone starts including DeCSS? How absurd!
I like a phrase I heard around here somewhere , "Anything that can be put on a t-shirt should be considered speech." That doesn't mean it is protected, "fire in a crowded theatre" or obscenity (unlike pornography) but at least is recognized as falling under the auspices of the First Amendment. I haven't read the whole judgement yet but can he keep people from putting DeCSS on a t-shirt and wearing it to court?
As a side note, isn't it strange that cuss words like d*mn and f*ck are said to be "obscenities" while the picture of an unclothed female in a possibly lewd position or pose is pornographic? Stay with me here, the strangeness comes from the community standards rulings that relate back to the First Amendment, things that are considered *Obscene* by the community can be legislatively prohibited, so why is the witchhunt going after plain-ol' naughty pictures instead of all that obscene language? Ain't people the strangest animal? Go figure!
Mith
The part in the article that bothers me the most is the claim that gravity hasn't been measured at distances smaller than a millimeter.
/dev/null 2>&1
I remember reading about an effect that could be measured with a table-top setup. Take to plates and put them really close together. At some distance, they are pushed together without any added force. The explanation was that the photon pressure (or was it some quantum effect?) on the outside surfaces of the plates was larger then the force pushing against the inside surfaces because the gap between the plates was smaller then the wavelength of the ( particle | force ).
Why not measure gravity at sub-millimeter distances by taking two plates, placing them inside a vacuum chamber that is electromagnetically shielded, including light. If you have a mechanism to very slowly push the plates together, you could put something like springs on each plate and measure the pull the springs are exerting(sp). Taking into account any friction, the force used to move the plates closer and the tension the springs create, shouldn't you be able to measure the tension on the springs to see if the plates pull on the springs with extra force at small distances?
A millimeter is about how thin a dime is. It's small but we have micrometers that can measure much smaller then that, surely we have devices that can measure very small forces like tension on a spring. All you would need to know for this experiment would be the tension created by the spring along the same distance without the plates to compare with the tension created by the springs with the plates.
Kelly
Ideas? Questions? Rants? Raves?
rants >
I wonder if the same thing is going to happen to these machines that happened to IBM's water-cooled mainframes.
The machines themselves would become obsolete but the cooling mechanism started becoming extremely valuable, sometimes to the point of costing more then the original machine. To keep older machines running after IBM discontinued the line mainframe owners would start searching for old machines to salvage the water-cooling parts. I believe I read that those parts had a very strong auction market for them.
Evidently water-cooling isn't very cost efficient compared to other ways of increasing CPU output. What they are doing now is shrinking the circuits but we already know that Intel can't keep doing that forever. What else is left to squeeze more power out of a given CPU design besides cooling?
My question is, how is the water-vapor circulated around the case and what happens if there is a leak?
Mith
The article has an error in it that has caused considerable bias to build up in this discussion.
The article states that what was reported was a 2% reduction in the magnets weight. This is completely FALSE!
The effect that was reported was that things were measured to weigh 2% less when measured in the column directly above the spinning superconductor. The magnets weight was never reported to change. This doesn't mean it doesn't change only that it wasn't the issue.
According to the original experiment, the researchers were looking into non-gravity related phenomenon associated with superconducting magnets. What they noticed was that smoke, which usually drifted down in normal air, was drifting up in the column above the apparatus. The description I read went into some length on the lengths they went to to isolate other factors like air temperature or air currents and the like.
NASA has a group that is trying to duplicate the experiment but have trouble fabricating the large ceramic disks used.
There have been other Doctoral level researchers that have published papers that attempt to come up with a theory to explain the results.
To say that it is "obviously" bogus is to admit to having a closed mind. I would suggest the alternative mindset: "I'll believe it when I see it" When you start to say "What a waste of money" and the like, you are saying that it isn't worth proving that it can't be done, which can only happen if you attempt it.
Leave it to the financial backers to decide if an experiment is "worth it".
Plenty of people told the Wright brothers that they were attempting the impossible. If they had believed their critics, where would we be?
I've heard that JWB got away from the Army and moved to Texas where he lived into the 20th century. He left some papers saying that he really was JWB and had been living under an assumed name the whole time.
Supposedly, the Army had a doctor sign a death certificate without letting him examine the body. The identification was done in twilight. There were some oversights like JWB had brown hair but the body had red hair, etc. The theory is that the Army felt they had to been seen as bringing Lincoln's assassin to justice one way or the other and without JWB alive, they needed a body and a plausible story.
Anyone know anything more about it?
In the book, there is some narration that referres to strange messages that are being transmitted over the public TV channel. It isn't covert but impossible to break without the codebook (code keys).
The message about slashdot posting is more like this. Post a message in public that only the receiver will know what to do with.
Here is what I'm going to do. I'm going to call the MPAA and let them know, politely, how I feel about their DeCSS actions.
.wav file so all I have to do is connect to their phone line and then play the file. I'd advise against automating it since there might be laws about computers calling relentlessly after the phone soliciters started using them. In this case I don't think there would be any way to prove that it's a recording but this way you don't bite off more then you're willing to chew.
I haven't called yet so I'm assuming that they don't have a person answering that number. Either way, I'll call personally first and then I might record a really long rant as a
I got this address from their website. It wasn't in the first few pages but I eventually found it.
I might even spend 2-3 bucks on photocopied postcards send on random days.
Main Office Address:
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA)
Motion Picture Association (MPA)
15503 Ventura Blvd.
Encino, California 91436
(818) 995-6600
Doh! I should have asked my Math-Degree wife to double check my figures. It shows you what I get for thinking that the numbers seemed too low and not double checking the math.
You are very right, their customers are much more sensitive to the price difference then to the availability of software they don't understand or really even use.
I've been looking around their site looking for the line of computers (Destination) and don't see it anymore so now even that revenue stream has dried up. They were working on an Internet Appliance but I think they they won't be able to pull it off.
I used to work for a small company that was a wholly-owned subsidiary of major PC vendor based in the northern plains. MOOoving right along, we did lots of cutting-edge software development with just released or unreleased hardware (translation: bleeding edge, and boy was there a lot of blood).
The main thing that we actually got into production was a large whole-machine interface package for a top-end line of their computers. It took a lot of time and effort and even after it was released it didn't really garner much fanfare in the public arena.
I started to do the math and our Return On Investment(ROI) to see why we were kept around. There were 20-25 people of different sorts. Six or seven developers, two artists, 6 platform guys(hardware or process), 2-4 testers depending on the stage of development, two contractors, a secretary, four managers and one VP. The Pres spot is reserved for a corporate big-wig. When I started to examine their cost structure and their revenue I started to wonder. Taking into account the mix of talent, you could use a round figure like $50,000 a year as an average salary, then add on the Human Resource overhead of 50% you get $75,000. Multiply by 25 and you get $1,875,000 in annual personnel expenses. Add to that facilities cost. The office was maybe 5,000 square feet so at a rate of $2/sq foot that comes to $10K a month or $120K a year. The fractional T-1 might be $1K monthly or $12K. Most other costs, like utilities can be lumped together , I'll just say all other costs total to what the rent amount is, $120K a year. So, we have
Salaries: $1,875K
Rent: $ 120K
T-1: $ 12K
Other: $ 120K
-------------------
Total: $2,127K
If the model this software was installed on sells 2,000 units a month, costs $4,000 and the gross margin is %20, that means $16,000 a month in gross profit. Say the software is attributed 10% of the gross profit, that would come to $1,600 a month or $19,200 a year. Granted, my percentage figures can't be accurate but I think they are good guesses. According to my numbers this model would have to sell 100 times better then this scenario, or some combination of 100 times between margin, sales and software percentage, for the subsidiary to pay it's own way.
Obviously nobody would be willing to fund this kind of startup without some prospect of getting something out of it. A major emphasis was on turning in "Intellectual Property" disclosures, a.k.a, patents, mostly of the software variety. Now, don't get me wrong, they had some really cool stuff but when disclosures are part of the quarterly goals and are listed in your annual review, you get the impression that they are important, not to mention that this was blatently stated numberous times, "patents are a very important part of what we do" (actually paraphrased).
Basically, we were a patent factory. It didn't matter as much if none of our products shipped as long as we were disclosing IP. They liked their products to ship as much as the next guy but it was always a struggle to the the parent company to have a clue how to take advantage of the software we wrote. A somewhat common occurance was that they didn't think of us until it was to late for us to provide them with anything useful.
Where is this leading? I thought you'd never ask. The reality is that unless you have one of those super-important patents, like IBM's scrolling screen patent, your goal as a company is to gather a portfolio of patents to defend yourself against other companies with porfolios of their own. There are two scenarios. The first is the company who is collecting a defensive portfolio, the second is the company who plans on aggressively enforcing a patent. They both are caused by the Patent Office's ignorance and that should be the main focus of our ire.
Now, this is my understanding on patent law. We had the legal guys from corporate come and brief us on the issues and this is what I can remember: In the US, you have 1 year after you publis to submit a patent application. Publishing means anything from a technical article at a conference to including the technology in a shipping product. This is normally not a problem but to be protected internationally, more countries require no public (as in to anybody not bound by a NDA) disclosure until after the application is filed. This means that if you want the broadest protection, you wait until after the application is filed before you make the information public. Another aspect is that patent applications are not available to the public. A patent is only released to the public after the application is accepted. This means that the only way for us to combat stupid patents to to be informed when they are issued and then start a challenge based on prior art that may not have been considered during the application process. The submitter is focussed on getting it issued and the PTO doesn't do much of it's own homework so it's up to the public (usually competitors) to challenge patents.
In closing, if we want to take more control of the patent situation, publish information as soon as it's "discovered" and then keep an eye on any patent that involves the published material and then challenge it if it was applied for AFTER the published date of the article or whatever.