excuse my ignorance in physics, but i always wondered: if light has no mass then it has no speed or energy because E=MC^2, right ? if you insert a 0 in M, then 0 times C^2 is 0, thus E = 0
That's a good question, and the answer is very simple. The equation E=MC^2 is a simplification. The actual equation is E^2=M^2*C^4 + P^2*C^2, where P is momentum. For particles at rest, momentum P is zero, so the equation simplifies to E=MC^2. For photons, rest mass M is zero, but they are always in motion, and the equation is E=PC. (Photons do have momentum even though their rest mass is zero.)
I dunno about you, but I'd like to keep these videos around longer than 48 hours. I don't "rent" songs on the iTMS, and I wouldn't want to be "renting" movies on the iMVS, either, unless it were a LOT cheaper.
Sure, some people want to buy movies, but the fact is that the business is different from music. There's an enormous movie rental market and practically nothing for music rentals. People like to listen to the same song over and over again dozens of times, but most people don't want to watch most movies more than once.
Just look at the success of Blockbuster and Netflix. The first company that can make an online delivery model work with good quality is going to be in a position to be just as successful as these companies. In that context, DRM and limited viewing time shouldn't be an issue. You download it, you watch it, and you delete it. It's just like Blockbuster except it saves you the trip to the store.
The main issue is still how to balance the quality against available bandwidth. The higher the bandwidth needed, the smaller the market segment that has access to that speed. You can trade off with lower quality, or requiring the subscriber to download the movie the night before. Netflix does OK with next day delivery so that should be tolerable with downloads as well.
The bottom line is that disk size is not an issue. Most people will be happy with the download-and-delete model. The real issues are bandwidth and quality.
I've always heard that online movies are compressed down to pretty low quality. How big would a two hour full HD movie be? Lots bigger than your typical DivX I bet. Your typical home broadband system would be hard put to download it in less than a day.
And this is when users need to actually read the warnings about certificates being different than the last time accessing the site...
What are you talking about? There is no such warning that I am aware of. I don't believe IE caches certificates and compares them with the last time you accessed a site. The only program that does this is ssh, which is hardly end-user material.
What will happen instead, if the DNS were to be hacked, is that the site will be UNABLE to come up witih a valid certificate on the DNS name it has stolen. If someone could hack and redirect paypal.com to their own site, they still wouldn't be able to offer a signature on a key named "paypal.com" with a certificate from a trusted issuer. The only certificate they could offer would be maybe a self-signed one, in which case you will get a warning. But it won't say that the certificate has changed, it will say that it is a bogus-looking certificate. That ought to alert people that something is wrong.
The link provided in the article for Trusted Computing is to Ross Anderson's so-called TCPA FAQ, which is badly biased in its opposition to the technology. For a more balanced description see the Wikipedia, especially the discussion page where some pros and cons of the technology are debated.
Yes, I think you are right that these pictures rule out the possibility that the dark areas are seas. If you look at this panorama it is clear that the probe is coming down into the dark area, the supposed "sea". Yet once it lands, this picture from the ground clearly shows nothing but rocks and dirt. And if you look closely at that shot, in the upper right corner we see the sky, meaning that the supposed "horizon" line labeled there is not in fact the horizon. Instead we are looking at a large mountain or some kind of highlands beyond the dark region. Comparing that to the panorama, I think the "horizon" line is actually the "coastline" separating the light from the dark area. So we have dark plains butting up against light highlands, rather than seas and continents.
As you say, so much for the seas, they are as mythical as those on the moon.
Can anyone explain to me why it's their right to hold copyrights in perpetuity?
Can anyone explain to me how the issue of perpetual copyrights justifies unauthorized publication of Daredevil, Red Planet and Miss Congeniality, which are no more than two years old? It's not like the guy was trying to share 75 year old movies.
There's not much need for the Trusted Computing features on these chips since they are mostly used in relatively closed platforms like cell phones and PDAs. It's mostly a matter of getting the chip count down. Eventually however the same integration will show up in desktop computers.
Ironically most work integrating TC into the OS is being done on Linux. Microsoft seems to have given up on NGSCB (aka Palladium); its web site hasn't been updated for a year. Linux projects include tcgLinux, as well as the Applied Data Security Group at the University of Bochum in Germany. There's also the Enforcer project which uses the TC chip to provide TripWire-like modification detection functionality.
I got a RoboSapien for Christmas but I was a little disappointed in it. Although it can go through a sort of throwing motion, it doesn't move its arms fast enough to actually throw anything. And likewise its ability to "pick up" lacks feedback and requires the object to be in exactly the right place as it goes through the motions.
It can be programmed to execute a sequence in response to a loud noise, but it's a maximum of about 8 moves. And then it's done, there's no way to have it go back into "listen" mode automatically.
Using the remote control, it doesn't walk all that straight. To adjust its course, you have to make it turn, and it can't turn and walk at the same time (at least, not intentionally). The way it turns is to rock from foot to foot, turning a tiny little bit each time, so it's really slow to correct its course.
For a toy that cost almost $100 I was expecting more.
Mod parent down! He includes a gratuitous advertising link to his Macintosh support company.
Plus he didn't even read the article. He wrote: "Spyware does not have to take control of a computer. It can be as simple as sending back browsing habits so cookies can, even, be not so far away from some spyware"
But the law disallows such actions.
(b) Collect, through intentionally deceptive means, personally identifiable information that meets any of the following criteria:...
(2) It includes all or substantially all of the Web sites visited by an authorized user, other than Web sites of the provider of the software, if the computer software was installed in a manner designed to conceal from all authorized users of the computer the fact that the software is being installed.
Many other specific malicious actions are called out and criminalized.
I gather that he would be falling straight down initially, then use his wing suit to convert his vertical velocity into horizontal. He could then have a very low vertical velocity, or possibly even a slight upward velocity. Unfortunately, to achieve this he will be moving horizontally at upwards of 100 mph.
Now, you probably have a better chance of surviving if you contact the ground moving horizontally at 100 mph than moving vertically, but it's still a pretty tough trick. Think about some way you could safely leap from a car moving at this speed and still survive, and these kinds of ideas might work for the wingsuit.
One possibility suggested was to land on water, but you will go into a tumble as soon as you make contact. What you need is an extremely low friction interface with the surface. Perhaps you could use an airport runway and get them to coat it with foam first. Even better would be thousands of feet of wet ice. That's about as low friction as you're going to get.
I was also thinking about wearing wheels on wrists and ankles. That would mess up the aerodynamics, but maybe you could make contact with the ground without going head over heels using gear like that.
It's weird that people have become so "undisciplined" that they can't accept death at the end of life.
But we've never become "disciplined" enough to accept disease and premature death. We fight against child mortality; we fight against polio and smallpox and AIDS. We oppose everything which takes away that most precious gift, life.
Why not oppose death itself? Is it truly more "disciplined" to accept death?
Admittedly the NYT article is extremely light on details (and those details don't show up until the end of the article), but from what it sounds like, the Google search tool sends a brief chunk of each search result, whether of local or network origin, to Google, so Google can display some ads.
It does sound like that, but that would be a terrible design, wouldn't it? It would mean your private search data is being sent to Google! And Google swore up and down that they wouldn't do this.
Actually, your private results are not sent to Google; rather, when the data comes back from Google, the toolbar mixes your private results into the web search results and passes that on to the browser. The problem is that it may not be the user directing the browser to do the request. It could be a Java applet, or maybe (with some help) some Javascript on a malicious web page. Then the nasty code sees the results and it can send them off to where they shouldn't go.
The way it works is actually pretty simple. What happens normally is that the toolbar watches your outgoing and incoming web connections. When you make a Google query, it detects that and does a local search of its index of your disk. When the results come back from Google, it mixes in the results from the web with the results from your disk. This design is to protect your privacy.
The attack is for a malicious site to download a Java applet to your system. This applet does a Google query (via the malicious site as a proxy, to defeat applet sandboxing), and then reads the results which come back. When the results get back to the applet they have gone through the Google toolbar and gotten the local disk results integrated. The applet then sends the data to the malicious site, and presto, it knows a lot about the contents of your disk.
It's because they can't speed up the clock rate any more. Nobody wants to admit it so they switch over to multicores and try to distract you from the fact that it's the same clock as in your current computer. They're terrified that people are going to stop upgrading.
I have given some thought towards creating such a dual-plaintext message. The main problem is that, in practice, generating a complete bogus plaintext for every "sensitive" message you send is going to be a pain and not many people will be willing to do it.
But if you are, the simplest approach is to encrypt all messages in a double-length mode. When sending an innocent message, one not requiring the double-encryption feature, it gets encrypted as usual, and gets paired with a random stream of noise data, of equal length. The noise data is randomly chosen to go in front of or behind your encrypted message. This is your usual data encryption format. Note that encrypting data like this doubles the message length, but for email and similar messages that's not usually a problem.
Then when you want to send a high-security message, you create an innocent one as a cover and encrypt both messages, under different keys. Send them side by side. Then when you are under pressure to reveal, tell them the key for the innocent message. The other half of the data will be indistinguishable from noise, just like when you send messages in the normal mode.
They will be suspicious about whether the other half really had a message, and the fact that you are using this cumbersome "deniable" system will make you look pretty bad. But they can't prove anything.
Of course a simpler approach is just to use ordinary cryptography and then erase the keys. Then you can't be called upon to reveal anything. And if they push, give them the plaintext - or at least, what you claim is the plaintext. This is really far more believable and plausible than using exotic cryptography to achieve what amounts to the same thing.
US Postage stamps circulated during the Civil War as small change. However, IIRC they were never officially accepted by the federal government as official legal tender.
I remember growing up the 1960s that you would often see "No stamps please" on mail-in offers on cereal boxes and comic books. Apparently people still used stamps at that time to pay small sums.
TinyP2P requires you specify the server address and port. Um, how is this different then FTPing to a server?
I hate it when people write "Um". It always sounds insulting.
If you read the documentation, you would see that TinyP2P does in fact search many hosts. When you start a server, you give it the URL of another server in the darknet. Then, all the data being served by all the servers in the darknet is available to each client. Even though the client connects to only one server, it can download files that are available from any of the servers.
One implication is that each user could run a server himself, as a daemon, and then connect to his own server using the client. This would be the classical peer to peer mode. Anything being shared by any of the peers can be retrieved by any of them. Or it can be used in a client-server mode where the servers are running on well connected machines and then clients can connect to a nearby server to do a download.
I'm using Safari and there is no link to the ad. There's an orange box on the left, saying Subscribe Now, One year for just 10 cents a day. And on the right there is a light gray box saying SPONSORED BY, with no sponsor listed, and under that, Get Free Day pass access to read this article after viewing a brief commercial with audio. But there's no link! Mousing over the right hand rectangle never produces anything for me to click on.
Thanks to the DMCA, if they sue you, they obviously illegally broke encryption somewhere along the line and would be liable themselves (as well as nullifying their evidence).
Sorry, this won't work. The DMCA makes it illegal to decrypt without the copyright owner's permission. In this case, it would be the copyright owner himself who is suing. He has his own permission to do the decryption. The DMCA will not stop this.
It's too bad that the same word is used for a graphics display system and a type of data storage. I read the other day about rumors about an Apple MP3 player that was "flash based" but didn't have a display and I thought, how the heck could that work? Then I realized which "flash" they meant.
I'm writing from an American perspective here, but I like TV. TV has been an important part of my life, a source of entertainment and relaxation as well as information when needed.
After 9/11, the internet collapsed, and no real news was available. Only TV provided reliable coverage, showing the footage, keeping us up to date with what was happening.
A few years ago I was working at home and happened to have the TV news on, and watched live as the Waco compound was stormed by cops, caught on fire and burned to the ground. Nothing afterwards, no tape or reporting, can compare to the impact of watching these events live in real time.
For entertainment, for all the talk about lowest common denominator, I have a genius level IQ and yet I enjoy the same shows that most other Americans do. I like Desperate Housewives and Lost. I like 24 and Alias. I like CSI and Law and Order. I also like science fiction: Enterprise, Tru Calling, Firefly. I enjoy some shows that are at the bottom of the ratings too: Jack and Bobby, Veronica Mars. I even like the reality series. Survivor never disappoints. I've been watching the Biggest Loser and the Branson shows too this season, and I'm waiting for American Idol.
So what does this mean? Well, there's no accounting for taste, but I can't help detecting a tinge of elitism in the many comments from people who don't like TV. I don't see why people are proud to say that the like movies but embarrassed to say that they like TV. A lot of the same people work in both fields. I don't see the quality of movies in general being any higher than those of television shows.
I do understand the objections about commercials, but I've got TiVo. I never watch a commercial I don't want to. And I watch my shows whenever I feel like it, not when they're programmed. TiVo takes an already great medium, TV, and makes it even better. With TiVo, television is the most reliable and least expensive form of entertainment available. I feel very lucky to have it.
In that discussion I see some debate about whether closed source has a business advantage, and the consensus was that it does, in at least some cases. But I don't see much about what the business advantage is of opening source.
Most business customers are not developers. They are no more able to benefit from open source than the average person would benefit from a set of engineering blueprints of their dishwasher. Open source only speaks to developers. To everyone else it is gibberish.
So what does a business gain by publishing its software in a way that the small percentage of people in the world who are developers can read it? I don't see that they gain much. Most businesses don't want people to be modifying and re-selling (or even re-giving-away) their software. Yes, maybe a few patches will come back, but most engineering departments are going to be resistant to bringing in outside material like that. By the time they vet it and make sure it is safe and works, they could have fixed the bug themselves for cheaper.
Disclaimer: I work for a company which publishes its source code, but retains copyright to it. We do this for a specific reason appropriate to our specific target market, that would not apply in most cases. But we don't get any benefit from it other than satisfying those particular market needs which make people want to see our code.
The concept is more than ten years old; I read about a proposal for a digital sundial (in the same sense as this one) in a magazine called the Mathematical Intelligencer back in the 80s. However I think that design was more complex and involved some kind of custom fractal-like structure so that the sunlight was always shadowed just right to produce digits. The patented version looks simpler and perhaps less elegant but much more practical.
Slashdot Mirror
excuse my ignorance in physics, but i always wondered: if light has no mass then it has no speed or energy because E=MC^2, right ? if you insert a 0 in M, then 0 times C^2 is 0, thus E = 0
That's a good question, and the answer is very simple. The equation E=MC^2 is a simplification. The actual equation is E^2=M^2*C^4 + P^2*C^2, where P is momentum. For particles at rest, momentum P is zero, so the equation simplifies to E=MC^2. For photons, rest mass M is zero, but they are always in motion, and the equation is E=PC. (Photons do have momentum even though their rest mass is zero.)
I dunno about you, but I'd like to keep these videos around longer than 48 hours. I don't "rent" songs on the iTMS, and I wouldn't want to be "renting" movies on the iMVS, either, unless it were a LOT cheaper.
Sure, some people want to buy movies, but the fact is that the business is different from music. There's an enormous movie rental market and practically nothing for music rentals. People like to listen to the same song over and over again dozens of times, but most people don't want to watch most movies more than once.
Just look at the success of Blockbuster and Netflix. The first company that can make an online delivery model work with good quality is going to be in a position to be just as successful as these companies. In that context, DRM and limited viewing time shouldn't be an issue. You download it, you watch it, and you delete it. It's just like Blockbuster except it saves you the trip to the store.
The main issue is still how to balance the quality against available bandwidth. The higher the bandwidth needed, the smaller the market segment that has access to that speed. You can trade off with lower quality, or requiring the subscriber to download the movie the night before. Netflix does OK with next day delivery so that should be tolerable with downloads as well.
The bottom line is that disk size is not an issue. Most people will be happy with the download-and-delete model. The real issues are bandwidth and quality.
I've always heard that online movies are compressed down to pretty low quality. How big would a two hour full HD movie be? Lots bigger than your typical DivX I bet. Your typical home broadband system would be hard put to download it in less than a day.
And this is when users need to actually read the warnings about certificates being different than the last time accessing the site...
What are you talking about? There is no such warning that I am aware of. I don't believe IE caches certificates and compares them with the last time you accessed a site. The only program that does this is ssh, which is hardly end-user material.
What will happen instead, if the DNS were to be hacked, is that the site will be UNABLE to come up witih a valid certificate on the DNS name it has stolen. If someone could hack and redirect paypal.com to their own site, they still wouldn't be able to offer a signature on a key named "paypal.com" with a certificate from a trusted issuer. The only certificate they could offer would be maybe a self-signed one, in which case you will get a warning. But it won't say that the certificate has changed, it will say that it is a bogus-looking certificate. That ought to alert people that something is wrong.
The link provided in the article for Trusted Computing is to Ross Anderson's so-called TCPA FAQ, which is badly biased in its opposition to the technology. For a more balanced description see the Wikipedia, especially the discussion page where some pros and cons of the technology are debated.
Yes, I think you are right that these pictures rule out the possibility that the dark areas are seas. If you look at this panorama it is clear that the probe is coming down into the dark area, the supposed "sea". Yet once it lands, this picture from the ground clearly shows nothing but rocks and dirt. And if you look closely at that shot, in the upper right corner we see the sky, meaning that the supposed "horizon" line labeled there is not in fact the horizon. Instead we are looking at a large mountain or some kind of highlands beyond the dark region. Comparing that to the panorama, I think the "horizon" line is actually the "coastline" separating the light from the dark area. So we have dark plains butting up against light highlands, rather than seas and continents.
As you say, so much for the seas, they are as mythical as those on the moon.
Can anyone explain to me why it's their right to hold copyrights in perpetuity?
Can anyone explain to me how the issue of perpetual copyrights justifies unauthorized publication of Daredevil, Red Planet and Miss Congeniality, which are no more than two years old? It's not like the guy was trying to share 75 year old movies.
There's not much need for the Trusted Computing features on these chips since they are mostly used in relatively closed platforms like cell phones and PDAs. It's mostly a matter of getting the chip count down. Eventually however the same integration will show up in desktop computers.
Ironically most work integrating TC into the OS is being done on Linux. Microsoft seems to have given up on NGSCB (aka Palladium); its web site hasn't been updated for a year. Linux projects include tcgLinux, as well as the Applied Data Security Group at the University of Bochum in Germany. There's also the Enforcer project which uses the TC chip to provide TripWire-like modification detection functionality.
I got a RoboSapien for Christmas but I was a little disappointed in it. Although it can go through a sort of throwing motion, it doesn't move its arms fast enough to actually throw anything. And likewise its ability to "pick up" lacks feedback and requires the object to be in exactly the right place as it goes through the motions.
It can be programmed to execute a sequence in response to a loud noise, but it's a maximum of about 8 moves. And then it's done, there's no way to have it go back into "listen" mode automatically.
Using the remote control, it doesn't walk all that straight. To adjust its course, you have to make it turn, and it can't turn and walk at the same time (at least, not intentionally). The way it turns is to rock from foot to foot, turning a tiny little bit each time, so it's really slow to correct its course.
For a toy that cost almost $100 I was expecting more.
Plus he didn't even read the article. He wrote: "Spyware does not have to take control of a computer.
It can be as simple as sending back browsing habits so cookies can, even, be not so far away from some spyware"
But the law disallows such actions.Many other specific malicious actions are called out and criminalized.
I gather that he would be falling straight down initially, then use his wing suit to convert his vertical velocity into horizontal. He could then have a very low vertical velocity, or possibly even a slight upward velocity. Unfortunately, to achieve this he will be moving horizontally at upwards of 100 mph.
Now, you probably have a better chance of surviving if you contact the ground moving horizontally at 100 mph than moving vertically, but it's still a pretty tough trick. Think about some way you could safely leap from a car moving at this speed and still survive, and these kinds of ideas might work for the wingsuit.
One possibility suggested was to land on water, but you will go into a tumble as soon as you make contact. What you need is an extremely low friction interface with the surface. Perhaps you could use an airport runway and get them to coat it with foam first. Even better would be thousands of feet of wet ice. That's about as low friction as you're going to get.
I was also thinking about wearing wheels on wrists and ankles. That would mess up the aerodynamics, but maybe you could make contact with the ground without going head over heels using gear like that.
It's weird that people have become so "undisciplined" that they can't accept death at the end of life.
But we've never become "disciplined" enough to accept disease and premature death. We fight against child mortality; we fight against polio and smallpox and AIDS. We oppose everything which takes away that most precious gift, life.
Why not oppose death itself? Is it truly more "disciplined" to accept death?
Admittedly the NYT article is extremely light on details (and those details don't show up until the end of the article), but from what it sounds like, the Google search tool sends a brief chunk of each search result, whether of local or network origin, to Google, so Google can display some ads.
It does sound like that, but that would be a terrible design, wouldn't it? It would mean your private search data is being sent to Google! And Google swore up and down that they wouldn't do this.
Actually, your private results are not sent to Google; rather, when the data comes back from Google, the toolbar mixes your private results into the web search results and passes that on to the browser. The problem is that it may not be the user directing the browser to do the request. It could be a Java applet, or maybe (with some help) some Javascript on a malicious web page. Then the nasty code sees the results and it can send them off to where they shouldn't go.
A web page on the attack is http://seclab.cs.rice.edu/ which also links to a technical report.
The way it works is actually pretty simple. What happens normally is that the toolbar watches your outgoing and incoming web connections. When you make a Google query, it detects that and does a local search of its index of your disk. When the results come back from Google, it mixes in the results from the web with the results from your disk. This design is to protect your privacy.
The attack is for a malicious site to download a Java applet to your system. This applet does a Google query (via the malicious site as a proxy, to defeat applet sandboxing), and then reads the results which come back. When the results get back to the applet they have gone through the Google toolbar and gotten the local disk results integrated. The applet then sends the data to the malicious site, and presto, it knows a lot about the contents of your disk.
It's because they can't speed up the clock rate any more. Nobody wants to admit it so they switch over to multicores and try to distract you from the fact that it's the same clock as in your current computer. They're terrified that people are going to stop upgrading.
For further information, here is a link to a long posting I made on sci.crypt five years ago on the topic of dual-plaintext messages:
/ 7f73818727a16be5
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/sci.crypt/msg
I have given some thought towards creating such a dual-plaintext message. The main problem is that, in practice, generating a complete bogus plaintext for every "sensitive" message you send is going to be a pain and not many people will be willing to do it.
But if you are, the simplest approach is to encrypt all messages in a double-length mode. When sending an innocent message, one not requiring the double-encryption feature, it gets encrypted as usual, and gets paired with a random stream of noise data, of equal length. The noise data is randomly chosen to go in front of or behind your encrypted message. This is your usual data encryption format. Note that encrypting data like this doubles the message length, but for email and similar messages that's not usually a problem.
Then when you want to send a high-security message, you create an innocent one as a cover and encrypt both messages, under different keys. Send them side by side. Then when you are under pressure to reveal, tell them the key for the innocent message. The other half of the data will be indistinguishable from noise, just like when you send messages in the normal mode.
They will be suspicious about whether the other half really had a message, and the fact that you are using this cumbersome "deniable" system will make you look pretty bad. But they can't prove anything.
Of course a simpler approach is just to use ordinary cryptography and then erase the keys. Then you can't be called upon to reveal anything. And if they push, give them the plaintext - or at least, what you claim is the plaintext. This is really far more believable and plausible than using exotic cryptography to achieve what amounts to the same thing.
US Postage stamps circulated during the Civil War as small change. However, IIRC they were never officially accepted by the federal government as official legal tender.
I remember growing up the 1960s that you would often see "No stamps please" on mail-in offers on cereal boxes and comic books. Apparently people still used stamps at that time to pay small sums.
TinyP2P requires you specify the server address and port. Um, how is this different then FTPing to a server?
I hate it when people write "Um". It always sounds insulting.
If you read the documentation, you would see that TinyP2P does in fact search many hosts. When you start a server, you give it the URL of another server in the darknet. Then, all the data being served by all the servers in the darknet is available to each client. Even though the client connects to only one server, it can download files that are available from any of the servers.
One implication is that each user could run a server himself, as a daemon, and then connect to his own server using the client. This would be the classical peer to peer mode. Anything being shared by any of the peers can be retrieved by any of them. Or it can be used in a client-server mode where the servers are running on well connected machines and then clients can connect to a nearby server to do a download.
I'm using Safari and there is no link to the ad. There's an orange box on the left, saying Subscribe Now, One year for just 10 cents a day. And on the right there is a light gray box saying SPONSORED BY, with no sponsor listed, and under that, Get Free Day pass access to read this article after viewing a brief commercial with audio. But there's no link! Mousing over the right hand rectangle never produces anything for me to click on.
Do other Safari users see the same thing?
Thanks to the DMCA, if they sue you, they obviously illegally broke encryption somewhere along the line and would be liable themselves (as well as nullifying their evidence).
Sorry, this won't work. The DMCA makes it illegal to decrypt without the copyright owner's permission. In this case, it would be the copyright owner himself who is suing. He has his own permission to do the decryption. The DMCA will not stop this.
It's too bad that the same word is used for a graphics display system and a type of data storage. I read the other day about rumors about an Apple MP3 player that was "flash based" but didn't have a display and I thought, how the heck could that work? Then I realized which "flash" they meant.
I'm writing from an American perspective here, but I like TV. TV has been an important part of my life, a source of entertainment and relaxation as well as information when needed.
After 9/11, the internet collapsed, and no real news was available. Only TV provided reliable coverage, showing the footage, keeping us up to date with what was happening.
A few years ago I was working at home and happened to have the TV news on, and watched live as the Waco compound was stormed by cops, caught on fire and burned to the ground. Nothing afterwards, no tape or reporting, can compare to the impact of watching these events live in real time.
For entertainment, for all the talk about lowest common denominator, I have a genius level IQ and yet I enjoy the same shows that most other Americans do. I like Desperate Housewives and Lost. I like 24 and Alias. I like CSI and Law and Order. I also like science fiction: Enterprise, Tru Calling, Firefly. I enjoy some shows that are at the bottom of the ratings too: Jack and Bobby, Veronica Mars. I even like the reality series. Survivor never disappoints. I've been watching the Biggest Loser and the Branson shows too this season, and I'm waiting for American Idol.
So what does this mean? Well, there's no accounting for taste, but I can't help detecting a tinge of elitism in the many comments from people who don't like TV. I don't see why people are proud to say that the like movies but embarrassed to say that they like TV. A lot of the same people work in both fields. I don't see the quality of movies in general being any higher than those of television shows.
I do understand the objections about commercials, but I've got TiVo. I never watch a commercial I don't want to. And I watch my shows whenever I feel like it, not when they're programmed. TiVo takes an already great medium, TV, and makes it even better. With TiVo, television is the most reliable and least expensive form of entertainment available. I feel very lucky to have it.
In that discussion I see some debate about whether closed source has a business advantage, and the consensus was that it does, in at least some cases. But I don't see much about what the business advantage is of opening source.
Most business customers are not developers. They are no more able to benefit from open source than the average person would benefit from a set of engineering blueprints of their dishwasher. Open source only speaks to developers. To everyone else it is gibberish.
So what does a business gain by publishing its software in a way that the small percentage of people in the world who are developers can read it? I don't see that they gain much. Most businesses don't want people to be modifying and re-selling (or even re-giving-away) their software. Yes, maybe a few patches will come back, but most engineering departments are going to be resistant to bringing in outside material like that. By the time they vet it and make sure it is safe and works, they could have fixed the bug themselves for cheaper.
Disclaimer: I work for a company which publishes its source code, but retains copyright to it. We do this for a specific reason appropriate to our specific target market, that would not apply in most cases. But we don't get any benefit from it other than satisfying those particular market needs which make people want to see our code.
The concept is more than ten years old; I read about a proposal for a digital sundial (in the same sense as this one) in a magazine called the Mathematical Intelligencer back in the 80s. However I think that design was more complex and involved some kind of custom fractal-like structure so that the sunlight was always shadowed just right to produce digits. The patented version looks simpler and perhaps less elegant but much more practical.