I read an article in an old Scientific American about an especially simple sundial: mount a globe of the Earth outside, orienting it to be exactly parallel to the real Earth. That means pointing the north pole of the globe at the North Star, and rotating it so that your current meridian of longitude runs across the top. This will put your current location exactly at the top of the globe.
The cool thing is that sunlight will now fall on the globe in exactly the way it falls on the Earth (during the day, that is). You can see the day-night terminator and it will be the same as the terminator on the actual Earth. You can see which polar regions are getting 24 hour sunlight or night. You can tell whether it is day or night anywhere on Earth, and even estimate what time it is there.
It sounded pretty cool although I never bothered to try to set one up. You'd need some kind of waterproof globe that wouldn't fade in the sunlight. Probably there are some like this on public display somewhere.
Charge Element 1: Examine and evaluate the experimental evidence for the occurrences of nuclear reactions in condensed matter at low energies (less that a few electron volts).
Two-thirds of the reviewers commenting on Charge Element 1 did not feel the evidence was conclusive for low energy nuclear reactions, one found the evidence convincing, and the remainder indicated they were somewhat convinced. Many reviewers noted that poor experiment design, documentation, background control and other similar issues hampered the understanding and interpretation of the results presented.
Charge Element 2: Determine whether the evidence is sufficiently conclusive to demonstrate that such nuclear reactions occur.
The preponderance of the reviewers' evaluations indicated that Charge Element 2, the occurrence of low energy nuclear reactions, is not conclusively demonstrated by the evidence presented. One reviewer believed that the occurrence was demonstrated, and several reviewers did not address the question.
Charge Element 3: Determine whether there is a scientific case for continued efforts in these studies and, if so, to identify the most promising areas to be pursued.
The nearly unanimous opinion of the reviewers was that funding agencies should entertain individual, well-designed proposals for experiments that address specific scientific issues relevant to the question of whether or not there is anomalous energy production in Pd/D systems, or whether or not D-D fusion reactions occur at energies on the order of a few eV. These proposals should meet accepted scientific standards, and undergo the rigors of peer review. No reviewer recommended a focused federally funded program for low energy nuclear reactions.
Take for instance a section heading. So far as the logical structure of a document is concerned, all that matters is that a particular piece of text should be ``marked'' somehow as a section heading. One might for instance type \section{Text of heading}.
Come on. No one in their right mind would want to type "\section{Text of heading}"! Nothing could be less intuitive!
If this is your alternative to a word processor, 99% of people would do better with a word processor. I mean, really, backslashes and curly braces and magic keywords that have to be memorized? Give me a break. That will never work for the typical user. Programmers, yes, but users, no.
I was recently diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma, a rare cancer of the lymph system that about 8,000 people will be diagnosed with this year in the US
I'm sorry to hear about this, but you have to understand that by virtue of the fact that yours is a rare case, few people are going to be like you, hence they should not follow advice which assumes that they are in your situation.
My wife is in health care, and I assure you that there are far more people who go from doctor to doctor thinking they are sick when they are actually well, then people who are truly sick but all the doctors can't find the problem. She has had many patients come in with multi-page typed documents describing all their symptoms in detail, all the doctors they have seen, the (infuriation!) non-diagnoses, etc., etc. These patients are obsessed and mentally unbalanced. Their diseases are their whole worlds, they give their lives structure and meaning.
Often the doctors will give them a diagnosis of fibromyalgia, which means pain of unknown origin. The patients seize upon this diagnosis - at last, proof that they are really sick! But my wife knows from hard experience that fibromyalgia really means a patient whom the doctor is just trying to get rid of.
A few patients in this kind of situation, like you, actually do have extremely rare diseases. But there are far more patients than this. For most of them, the problem is only in their heads.
I'm not saying that's the situation with Mr. Volkerding, obviously I am not in a position to know. But it's possible that he is under pressure and it is affecting his judgement on these matters. Being sick is a graceful and socially acceptable way to bow out of stressful situations. If all his doctors say he's OK then frankly it is more probable that something like this is happening than that he has an undiagnosed rare disease which will be identified if he just goes to the right doctor. That's how the probabilities work.
Here's one I used to be able to do. With a bit of practice, you can instantly tell the cube root of any 6 digit number, if the root is an integer. The secret is that the answer will be two digits, and the right digit matches the right digit of the starting number, unless it is one of the pairs 2-8 or 3-7, in which case it is the other member of the pair.
The left digit can be found by memorizing the cubes of the numbers from 0-9: 0, 1, 8, 27, 64, 125, 216, 343, 512, 729. Compare the left 3 digits of the 6 digit number with this series and the left digit of the answer is the biggest value smaller than that.
For example, the cube root of 250047 is 63: the 6 because 250 is bigger than 216 (6 cubed) but less than 343 (7 cubed); and the 3 because the last digit is 7 which is part of the 3-7 pair. The cube root of 592704 is 84: 8 because 592 is between 512 and 729; and 4 because it matches the last digit.
The problem's not that people are pirating the game -It's a problem, don't misunderstand, but the issue of legitimate purchasers being locked out of the game because they chose to circumvent the game's CD requirements.
The CD-checking requirement is itself an anti-piracy move. The idea is that pirated versions of the software would not have access to the original CDs. Forcing the software to check for the presence of an original CD discourages piracy.
When you, with a legitimate copy of the game, disable this check, you look just like a pirate who has disabled the check because he doesn't have a legitimate copy. It's perfectly reasonable for Valve to view you in the same light as the pirate, because your actions are the same as the pirate's.
Imagine for example a game that was sold with a "dongle", a device that plugged into one of your computer's ports and whose presence was checked by the game. This anti-piracy technique used to be common for high end software. Now, you might choose to hack your software to disable the dongle check. But again, this is exactly the action taken to enable piracy. From the manufacturer's perspective, you now look just like a pirate.
In general, disabling an anti-piracy measure is going to make you look like a pirate, even if you are in fact a legitimate purchaser. You don't have a 'right' to make such changes.
If an anti-piracy measure is too onerous, the correct answer is to vote with your pocketbook. Don't buy the product. And sure, go ahead and complain to the manufacturer so that he knows why he is losing business. This will give him incentive to design less obtrusive anti-piracy techniques.
I want to add to this, because the message does not seem to be getting out.
THE BILL DOES NOT MAKE IT ILLEGAL TO SKIP COMMERCIALS.
The bill, which is the Senate version of HR2391 (click on the last link to read the Senate version), section 212, amends 17 USC 110. That section of the U.S. Code starts off, "Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, the following are not infringements of copyright:". It then lists 10 exemptions, like certain recordings for the blind and for nonprofit agricultural trade shows.
The new bill adds an 11th provision:
(11) the making imperceptible, by or at the direction of a member of a private household, of limited portions of audio or video content of a motion picture, during a performance in or transmitted to that household for private home viewing, from an authorized copy of the motion picture, or the creation or provision of a computer program or other technology that enables such making imperceptible and that is designed and marketed for such use at the direction of a member of a private household, if--
(A) no fixed copy of the altered version of the motion picture is created by such computer program or other technology; and
(B) no changes, deletions or additions are made by such computer program or other technology to commercial advertisements, or to network or station promotional announcements, that would otherwise be performed or displayed before, during or after the performance of the motion picture.
In other words, the new bill adds a new exemption from any copyright which may otherwise apply, for systems which block certain content, as long as they don't block commercials.
Now here's where you have to use your head. Don't worry, it's just for a minute, it won't hurt that much. You have to try to understand the difference between an exemption to copyright which doesn't include skipping commercials, versus a law which forbids skipping commercials. The second one would obviously be bad. The first one merely doesn't say that skipping commercials is legal. But it also doesn't say that skipping commercials is illegal. It doesn't take a position on the issue one way or the other.
This is the measure which has gotten blown up into messages all over the net that say it is going to be illegal to skip commercials. Actually, if you read the plain language of the bill, that is not the case. The bill merely refrains from legalizing skipping commercials.
Now, you might say that the fact that the bill makes this suggestion implies or suggests that skipping commercials must be illegal, otherwise why would it need to exempt them? Well, that's not how it works. Skipping commercials has not, to my knowledge, been tested as to its legality. The lawmakers wanted to make sure they didn't pre-empt the issue.
The law doesn't work by nudges and winks. The fact that this bill failed to explicitly legalize skipping commercials does not in any way imply that it is making the action illegal. Rather, the legal status of skipping commercials is completely unchanged by the bill. Those are the facts, and hopefully the evidence I have presented above is clear enough to let you see so for yourself.
TiVo has 3 fast forward speeds: 3X, 18X and 60X (source, TiVo FAQ). If you're skipping commercials at high speed, as I always do, a one minute commercial goes by in one second! How annoying can a pop-up ad be during that time?
If everyone had PVRs and did this kind of skipping, advertisers could get the same effect by putting up a stationary box for the whole minute with their ad text, on part of the screen. It's not objectionable.
The main new feature is that you can press a button and send in your name and address to request information about the product. TiVo has had opt-in ads accessible from their main menu like this for a year or more. These are high quality ads and I've used the opt-in occasionally, it's pretty nice.
The big problem I see is that there is no time to react in one second and press a button to get more information. My guess is that this is targetted at the people who FF at 18X, who will have 3 seconds to react. Quick people like me won't be affected.
Far more annoying are the banner ads which run across the bottom of regular programs, advertising upcoming shows (and sometimes products!). These have recently become noisy and drown out the dialog or add incongruous sound effects spoiling the scene. I expect the use of this kind of advertising to increase because you can't TiVo around it. Banners during commercials would be much less of a problem.
However, under the proposed law, skipping any commercials or promotional announcements would be prohibited.
This is wrong. The proposed law does not prohibit skipping commercials.
What this portion of the law is about are products like ClearPlay, which is a DVD player that "sanitizes" movies by eliminating the naughty bits. Some object to this as censorship, others endorse it as personal control of content.
Movie producers have claimed that ClearPlay violates their copyrights on movies. This new bill incorporates an earlier proposal that would basically make it clear that the system does not violate copyright. It explicitly says that these kinds of filtering systems are legal.
However, the exemption from copyright does not apply to systems that eliminate commercials. That is the clause which is causing so much controversy. It leaves open the possibility that filtering commercials might be said to violate the copyright held by the original producers of the content.
Here is where the big mistake is made in interpreting this. The new law does not change the legal status of filtering commercials. It might be legal, or it might not. Generally, it is untested. What the new law FAILS to do is to explicitly state that it is legal.
I hope that readers are intelligent enough to distinguish between a law that criminalizes skipping commercials, versus a law that fails to legalize them. The truth is that this law does not change the legality of the action.
Unfortunately the Wired author either was not intelligent enough to make this distinction, or chose to present an inflammatory and false interpretation in order to increase his readership and make more money for his employer.
Doesn't all music on an iPod come from a computer? Why not get it from there?
The point is music piracy. You put your music on your iPod and carry it to someone else's computer, then give them 40 GB of music files. That's the real purpose of this functionality, iPod as sneakernet.
The RC4 stream cipher has a number of weaknesses. See Itsik Mantin's RC4 page; he is a crypto student who did his master's thesis on RC4. Among other weaknesses, the 2nd byte of the output is twice as likely to match the plaintext as it should be; there are weak keys; and it is possible to distinguish the output from randomness. Some of the attacks are practical and have been used to break the WEP wireless encryption algorithm, which uses RC4.
If you really need speed, you can use RC4 securely but you have to know what you are doing and be aware of these attacks so you can employ protective countermeasures. Otherwise you are better off to use a cipher like AES which is actually secure.
I mean, if I remember my optics correctly, the way the cornea/lens assembly works is that all incoming light originating at the same point out there ends up in the same spot on the retina, regardless of which path they take through the lens.
If this were true, then you'd be right that this system couldn't work. All the light does start at the same point, only the laser beams it at different directions towards the pupil of your eye. If your lens then bent all those beams back to the same point as you suggest, you wouldn't see an image.
The reason it doesn't happen is that the laser is out of focus. No one can focus a fraction of an inch in front of their eye. This means that the lens cannot correct for the distance and so the different rays from the laser do not get converged back to the same point.
However it does suggest that changing the focus of your lens (as when you are looking "through" the image at a distant vs a near point) would not cause the image to go blurry but would instead cause it to change size or shape. The closer you focus, the more the image would be compressed. That sounds like it might be a somewhat distracting effect.
I don't believe there is a moral duty to stick to authorized music. I do believe that politeness is the only path to a political solution. If somebody wants me to stand on my head while listening to their music, I will either stand on my head or find other music. If somebody wants me to listen to their music, they will have to make it available under terms that I can accept.
Politeness is a winner tactic. It forces the crappy businessmen in the recording industry to stop hiding behind piracy. It makes the good guys smell serious. It's a dignified way of living. It helps musicians who respect listeners get popular at the expense of musicians who don't. The sole problem with politeness is that the technology and culture to filter up the best music libre is still immature.
In other words, don't steal music. Take music from people who give you permission to do so. It's common decency and politeness. Gonze's technology is supposed to help you find music like this which is just as good as the crap you've been stealing.
Even without cryptographic jiggery-pokery,..... Say, wha?????
The cryptographic jiggery-pokery in question would be a camera which digitally signed its output. It could use a key built in on a tamper-proof chip.
It wouldn't be impossible to fool such cameras, for example you could use rear projection on a screen in front of the camera to make up a faked image. But it would be more difficult.
It would be really, really weak, because it is so thin. The slightest breeze would destroy it, if you made a macroscopically sized piece. And of course you couldn't see it, or feel it. You wouldn't even know it was there without special instruments.
As bonds go, the inter-atomic bonds in this fabric are strong; but there's only one layer! Compared to like ten million atomic layers in a typical fabric. The carbon bonds aren't *that* much stronger that you can make a ten million times thinner (and weaker) piece and still have it be strong.
It's the same with nanotubes; they're as strong as tubes get, considering that they're only a nanometer in diameter. But compared to the weakest macroscopic thread you could imagine, an individual nanotube is far weaker. Proposed nanotube cables would use trillions of them in parallel to carry a load.
I have a web domain mainly to receive e-mail.
When I send mail, I use my domain in the "from."
However, my domain provider doesn't allow smtp, so my outgoing mail is through my ISP.
If my ISP supports domain-keys, they will sign my outgoing mail, but it will NOT match my totally-legitimate "from."
Well, I may be too dumb to see why this won't work, but here's my crazy idea. Set your "From:" to be the place it's from, and set your "Reply-To:" to be the place you want 'em to reply to. How's that sound?
HALF OF THE WORKING-AGE POPULATION IS NOT EMPLOYED FULL-TIME
When I was growing up in the 1950s half the working-age population didn't even work. They were called "women". The economy has absorbed an enormous influx of new workers over subsequent decades, and if not everybody has a full time job, guess what: not everybody wants one.
The article at this time has an extra phrase, "The 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics" stuck in between Politzer and Wilczek. It's missing some commas, too. At this point it appears that the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics went to, among others, the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics. It will be interesting to hear the Prize give its own acceptance speech. Perhaps the medal itself will be carried to the podium and placed by the microphone so we can learn about its insights into quantum theory. At least it's better than having the winner be an inanimate carbon rod.
Small earthquakes had been occurring continuously in the crater since Sept. 23. They grew steadily stronger, finally reaching a magnitude of 3.3 Thursday and Friday, but the earthquakes quit after the eruption, said University of Washington seismologist Tony Qamar.
"That makes us think this is the end of the eruption," Qamar said. "All this buildup was leading to that relatively small eruption."
I don't understand why the sites would complain. Take the top news story there right now:
Bush, Kerry Hope to Win Voters in Debate ABC News- 1 hour ago CORAL GABLES, Fla. Sept. 29, 2004 - Two candidates, two very different tasks for the first presidential debate. John Kerry has to convince voters they should throw President Bush out of office for his actions...
You don't get any useful information from that excerpt. You're going to click on the link, which will take you through to the ABC News page. And that page has got ads on it! I just learned how Olay face cream can improve my complexion. So because of Google News, ABC got a page view for its advertiser that it wouldn't have gotten otherwise. The same with the other pages that Google links to.
It seems that all Google has to do is to get permission from sites to link to their stories. The ones that refuse are giving up a source of revenue. Why would any commercial site not want the most popular site in the world to link to them? Jeez, Google should be charging sites for the right to be indexed by Google News.
The article by Fortunato explained that one reason for the failure and disbanding of the IETF MARID working group was that Microsoft's patent application was published last week and turned out to be much broader than expected. As written it would seem to cover SPF, which is odd since the patent was submitted four months after SPF got started.
The truth is that patent applications are written as broadly as possible and it is common for them to be whittled down by the patent office to only those claims which are truly novel and useful. But this still leaves us with considerable uncertainty about just how broad the Microsoft patent will turn out to be when it is finally issued. We won't know the answer for years, given the usual speed of the patent office.
I used to have a nuclear wristwatch
on
Nuclear Batteries
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· Score: 1
20 years ago I had a wristwatch whose glow was powered by radioactive tritium (Hydrogen-3). As the tritium decayed the nuclear particles struck fluorescent materials behind the watch digits and produced a nice glow. It was really bright, too, and I could use it as a makeshift flashlight to illuminate keyholes and such. The main problem was that there was no way to turn it off, it always glowed and was sometimes a bit of a nuisance in movies and other dark places.
This new thing sounds great, a nuclear powered buzzer using piezoelectric materials to produce electrical pulses. They need to improve the efficiency so it can work with something that has a half life measured in years rather than a few months, so you never have to change batteries.
And for the trailers - they are ruly insufferable - hard to believe anyone went to see ANH on the strength of the trailer
I remember seeing the trailer for Star Wars. It was shown with Ralph Bakshi's animated Wizards. I was astonished. It looked fantastic, and I began counting the months until the movie would open.
In those days, the big movies opened narrowly, in just a few theaters, and I and some friends made plans to go downtown and see it in Hollywood. There wasn't that much buzz about the film until a few days before when Time magazine had a big article on it. So that made the lines huge, but we got there early enough and got in.
Shortly before the film began, a guy sitting in the row behind us was talking to his friend. I guess he was in the industry because he'd seen the movie already. He said to his friend, "I really envy everyone here. They're about to see Star Wars for the first time." Then the lights went down, and by the end of the first scene, everyone was cheering. It was amazing.
One really cool technology on the horizon is Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). These will use the 5.9 GHz band for Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC). Basically, cars will talk to each other and to the roadside, exchanging status information relevant to safety and efficiency. You could be alerted to upcoming traffic jams or approaching emergency vehicles. There is also talk about making traffic signals more efficient by letting them know when cars are coming, way in advance.
VANETs are a variant of mobile networking which have plenty of electrical and computational power available at each node, and where node to node distances are typically small. It's an ideal environment for mobile networking.
Slashdot Mirror
I read an article in an old Scientific American about an especially simple sundial: mount a globe of the Earth outside, orienting it to be exactly parallel to the real Earth. That means pointing the north pole of the globe at the North Star, and rotating it so that your current meridian of longitude runs across the top. This will put your current location exactly at the top of the globe.
The cool thing is that sunlight will now fall on the globe in exactly the way it falls on the Earth (during the day, that is). You can see the day-night terminator and it will be the same as the terminator on the actual Earth. You can see which polar regions are getting 24 hour sunlight or night. You can tell whether it is day or night anywhere on Earth, and even estimate what time it is there.
It sounded pretty cool although I never bothered to try to set one up. You'd need some kind of waterproof globe that wouldn't fade in the sunlight. Probably there are some like this on public display somewhere.
Charge Element 1: Examine and evaluate the experimental evidence for the occurrences of nuclear reactions in condensed matter at low energies (less that a few electron volts).
Two-thirds of the reviewers commenting on Charge Element 1 did not feel the evidence was conclusive for low energy nuclear reactions, one found the evidence convincing, and the remainder indicated they were somewhat convinced. Many reviewers noted that poor experiment design, documentation, background control and other similar issues hampered the understanding and interpretation of the results presented.
Charge Element 2: Determine whether the evidence is sufficiently conclusive to demonstrate that such nuclear reactions occur.
The preponderance of the reviewers' evaluations indicated that Charge Element 2, the occurrence of low energy nuclear reactions, is not conclusively demonstrated by the evidence presented. One reviewer believed that the occurrence was demonstrated, and several reviewers did not address the question.
Charge Element 3: Determine whether there is a scientific case for continued efforts in these studies and, if so, to identify the most promising areas to be pursued.
The nearly unanimous opinion of the reviewers was that funding agencies should entertain individual, well-designed proposals for experiments that address specific scientific issues relevant to the question of whether or not there is anomalous energy production in Pd/D systems, or whether or not D-D fusion reactions occur at energies on the order of a few eV. These proposals should meet accepted scientific standards, and undergo the rigors of peer review. No reviewer recommended a focused federally funded program for low energy nuclear reactions.
Oh, right. I love this comment:
Come on. No one in their right mind would want to type "\section{Text of heading}"! Nothing could be less intuitive!
If this is your alternative to a word processor, 99% of people would do better with a word processor. I mean, really, backslashes and curly braces and magic keywords that have to be memorized? Give me a break. That will never work for the typical user. Programmers, yes, but users, no.
I was recently diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma, a rare cancer of the lymph system that about 8,000 people will be diagnosed with this year in the US
I'm sorry to hear about this, but you have to understand that by virtue of the fact that yours is a rare case, few people are going to be like you, hence they should not follow advice which assumes that they are in your situation.
My wife is in health care, and I assure you that there are far more people who go from doctor to doctor thinking they are sick when they are actually well, then people who are truly sick but all the doctors can't find the problem. She has had many patients come in with multi-page typed documents describing all their symptoms in detail, all the doctors they have seen, the (infuriation!) non-diagnoses, etc., etc. These patients are obsessed and mentally unbalanced. Their diseases are their whole worlds, they give their lives structure and meaning.
Often the doctors will give them a diagnosis of fibromyalgia, which means pain of unknown origin. The patients seize upon this diagnosis - at last, proof that they are really sick! But my wife knows from hard experience that fibromyalgia really means a patient whom the doctor is just trying to get rid of.
A few patients in this kind of situation, like you, actually do have extremely rare diseases. But there are far more patients than this. For most of them, the problem is only in their heads.
I'm not saying that's the situation with Mr. Volkerding, obviously I am not in a position to know. But it's possible that he is under pressure and it is affecting his judgement on these matters. Being sick is a graceful and socially acceptable way to bow out of stressful situations. If all his doctors say he's OK then frankly it is more probable that something like this is happening than that he has an undiagnosed rare disease which will be identified if he just goes to the right doctor. That's how the probabilities work.
Here's one I used to be able to do. With a bit of practice, you can instantly tell the cube root of any 6 digit number, if the root is an integer. The secret is that the answer will be two digits, and the right digit matches the right digit of the starting number, unless it is one of the pairs 2-8 or 3-7, in which case it is the other member of the pair.
The left digit can be found by memorizing the cubes of the numbers from 0-9: 0, 1, 8, 27, 64, 125, 216, 343, 512, 729. Compare the left 3 digits of the 6 digit number with this series and the left digit of the answer is the biggest value smaller than that.
For example, the cube root of 250047 is 63: the 6 because 250 is bigger than 216 (6 cubed) but less than 343 (7 cubed); and the 3 because the last digit is 7 which is part of the 3-7 pair. The cube root of 592704 is 84: 8 because 592 is between 512 and 729; and 4 because it matches the last digit.
The problem's not that people are pirating the game -It's a problem, don't misunderstand, but the issue of legitimate purchasers being locked out of the game because they chose to circumvent the game's CD requirements.
The CD-checking requirement is itself an anti-piracy move. The idea is that pirated versions of the software would not have access to the original CDs. Forcing the software to check for the presence of an original CD discourages piracy.
When you, with a legitimate copy of the game, disable this check, you look just like a pirate who has disabled the check because he doesn't have a legitimate copy. It's perfectly reasonable for Valve to view you in the same light as the pirate, because your actions are the same as the pirate's.
Imagine for example a game that was sold with a "dongle", a device that plugged into one of your computer's ports and whose presence was checked by the game. This anti-piracy technique used to be common for high end software. Now, you might choose to hack your software to disable the dongle check. But again, this is exactly the action taken to enable piracy. From the manufacturer's perspective, you now look just like a pirate.
In general, disabling an anti-piracy measure is going to make you look like a pirate, even if you are in fact a legitimate purchaser. You don't have a 'right' to make such changes.
If an anti-piracy measure is too onerous, the correct answer is to vote with your pocketbook. Don't buy the product. And sure, go ahead and complain to the manufacturer so that he knows why he is losing business. This will give him incentive to design less obtrusive anti-piracy techniques.
THE BILL DOES NOT MAKE IT ILLEGAL TO SKIP COMMERCIALS.
The bill, which is the Senate version of HR2391 (click on the last link to read the Senate version), section 212, amends 17 USC 110. That section of the U.S. Code starts off, "Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, the following are not infringements of copyright:". It then lists 10 exemptions, like certain recordings for the blind and for nonprofit agricultural trade shows.
The new bill adds an 11th provision:
In other words, the new bill adds a new exemption from any copyright which may otherwise apply, for systems which block certain content, as long as they don't block commercials.
Now here's where you have to use your head. Don't worry, it's just for a minute, it won't hurt that much. You have to try to understand the difference between an exemption to copyright which doesn't include skipping commercials, versus a law which forbids skipping commercials. The second one would obviously be bad. The first one merely doesn't say that skipping commercials is legal. But it also doesn't say that skipping commercials is illegal. It doesn't take a position on the issue one way or the other.
This is the measure which has gotten blown up into messages all over the net that say it is going to be illegal to skip commercials. Actually, if you read the plain language of the bill, that is not the case. The bill merely refrains from legalizing skipping commercials.
Now, you might say that the fact that the bill makes this suggestion implies or suggests that skipping commercials must be illegal, otherwise why would it need to exempt them? Well, that's not how it works. Skipping commercials has not, to my knowledge, been tested as to its legality. The lawmakers wanted to make sure they didn't pre-empt the issue.
The law doesn't work by nudges and winks. The fact that this bill failed to explicitly legalize skipping commercials does not in any way imply that it is making the action illegal. Rather, the legal status of skipping commercials is completely unchanged by the bill. Those are the facts, and hopefully the evidence I have presented above is clear enough to let you see so for yourself.
TiVo has 3 fast forward speeds: 3X, 18X and 60X (source, TiVo FAQ). If you're skipping commercials at high speed, as I always do, a one minute commercial goes by in one second! How annoying can a pop-up ad be during that time?
If everyone had PVRs and did this kind of skipping, advertisers could get the same effect by putting up a stationary box for the whole minute with their ad text, on part of the screen. It's not objectionable.
The main new feature is that you can press a button and send in your name and address to request information about the product. TiVo has had opt-in ads accessible from their main menu like this for a year or more. These are high quality ads and I've used the opt-in occasionally, it's pretty nice.
The big problem I see is that there is no time to react in one second and press a button to get more information. My guess is that this is targetted at the people who FF at 18X, who will have 3 seconds to react. Quick people like me won't be affected.
Far more annoying are the banner ads which run across the bottom of regular programs, advertising upcoming shows (and sometimes products!). These have recently become noisy and drown out the dialog or add incongruous sound effects spoiling the scene. I expect the use of this kind of advertising to increase because you can't TiVo around it. Banners during commercials would be much less of a problem.
However, under the proposed law, skipping any commercials or promotional announcements would be prohibited.
This is wrong. The proposed law does not prohibit skipping commercials.
What this portion of the law is about are products like ClearPlay, which is a DVD player that "sanitizes" movies by eliminating the naughty bits. Some object to this as censorship, others endorse it as personal control of content.
Movie producers have claimed that ClearPlay violates their copyrights on movies. This new bill incorporates an earlier proposal that would basically make it clear that the system does not violate copyright. It explicitly says that these kinds of filtering systems are legal.
However, the exemption from copyright does not apply to systems that eliminate commercials. That is the clause which is causing so much controversy. It leaves open the possibility that filtering commercials might be said to violate the copyright held by the original producers of the content.
Here is where the big mistake is made in interpreting this. The new law does not change the legal status of filtering commercials. It might be legal, or it might not. Generally, it is untested. What the new law FAILS to do is to explicitly state that it is legal.
I hope that readers are intelligent enough to distinguish between a law that criminalizes skipping commercials, versus a law that fails to legalize them. The truth is that this law does not change the legality of the action.
Unfortunately the Wired author either was not intelligent enough to make this distinction, or chose to present an inflammatory and false interpretation in order to increase his readership and make more money for his employer.
Doesn't all music on an iPod come from a computer? Why not get it from there?
The point is music piracy. You put your music on your iPod and carry it to someone else's computer, then give them 40 GB of music files. That's the real purpose of this functionality, iPod as sneakernet.
If you really need speed, you can use RC4 securely but you have to know what you are doing and be aware of these attacks so you can employ protective countermeasures. Otherwise you are better off to use a cipher like AES which is actually secure.
I mean, if I remember my optics correctly, the way the cornea/lens assembly works is that all incoming light originating at the same point out there ends up in the same spot on the retina, regardless of which path they take through the lens.
If this were true, then you'd be right that this system couldn't work. All the light does start at the same point, only the laser beams it at different directions towards the pupil of your eye. If your lens then bent all those beams back to the same point as you suggest, you wouldn't see an image.
The reason it doesn't happen is that the laser is out of focus. No one can focus a fraction of an inch in front of their eye. This means that the lens cannot correct for the distance and so the different rays from the laser do not get converged back to the same point.
However it does suggest that changing the focus of your lens (as when you are looking "through" the image at a distant vs a near point) would not cause the image to go blurry but would instead cause it to change size or shape. The closer you focus, the more the image would be compressed. That sounds like it might be a somewhat distracting effect.
Sounds to me like it's worth a try.
Even without cryptographic jiggery-pokery, ..... Say, wha?????
0 7.pdf (warning PDF).
The cryptographic jiggery-pokery in question would be a camera which digitally signed its output. It could use a key built in on a tamper-proof chip.
It wouldn't be impossible to fool such cameras, for example you could use rear projection on a screen in front of the camera to make up a faked image. But it would be more difficult.
As an example see this academic paper on the "trustworth camera", http://www.tsi.enst.fr/~maitre/tatouage/icip96/10
It would be really, really weak, because it is so thin. The slightest breeze would destroy it, if you made a macroscopically sized piece. And of course you couldn't see it, or feel it. You wouldn't even know it was there without special instruments.
As bonds go, the inter-atomic bonds in this fabric are strong; but there's only one layer! Compared to like ten million atomic layers in a typical fabric. The carbon bonds aren't *that* much stronger that you can make a ten million times thinner (and weaker) piece and still have it be strong.
It's the same with nanotubes; they're as strong as tubes get, considering that they're only a nanometer in diameter. But compared to the weakest macroscopic thread you could imagine, an individual nanotube is far weaker. Proposed nanotube cables would use trillions of them in parallel to carry a load.
Well, I may be too dumb to see why this won't work, but here's my crazy idea. Set your "From:" to be the place it's from, and set your "Reply-To:" to be the place you want 'em to reply to. How's that sound?
HALF OF THE WORKING-AGE POPULATION IS NOT EMPLOYED FULL-TIME
When I was growing up in the 1950s half the working-age population didn't even work. They were called "women". The economy has absorbed an enormous influx of new workers over subsequent decades, and if not everybody has a full time job, guess what: not everybody wants one.
The article at this time has an extra phrase, "The 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics" stuck in between Politzer and Wilczek. It's missing some commas, too. At this point it appears that the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics went to, among others, the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics. It will be interesting to hear the Prize give its own acceptance speech. Perhaps the medal itself will be carried to the podium and placed by the microphone so we can learn about its insights into quantum theory. At least it's better than having the winner be an inanimate carbon rod.
You don't get any useful information from that excerpt. You're going to click on the link, which will take you through to the ABC News page. And that page has got ads on it! I just learned how Olay face cream can improve my complexion. So because of Google News, ABC got a page view for its advertiser that it wouldn't have gotten otherwise. The same with the other pages that Google links to.
It seems that all Google has to do is to get permission from sites to link to their stories. The ones that refuse are giving up a source of revenue. Why would any commercial site not want the most popular site in the world to link to them? Jeez, Google should be charging sites for the right to be indexed by Google News.
"Google News: Beta Not Make Money" is a pun!
"Google News Better Not Make Money" or else they'll be sued because it will have become commercial use, see?
The article by Fortunato explained that one reason for the failure and disbanding of the IETF MARID working group was that Microsoft's patent application was published last week and turned out to be much broader than expected. As written it would seem to cover SPF, which is odd since the patent was submitted four months after SPF got started.
The truth is that patent applications are written as broadly as possible and it is common for them to be whittled down by the patent office to only those claims which are truly novel and useful. But this still leaves us with considerable uncertainty about just how broad the Microsoft patent will turn out to be when it is finally issued. We won't know the answer for years, given the usual speed of the patent office.
20 years ago I had a wristwatch whose glow was powered by radioactive tritium (Hydrogen-3). As the tritium decayed the nuclear particles struck fluorescent materials behind the watch digits and produced a nice glow. It was really bright, too, and I could use it as a makeshift flashlight to illuminate keyholes and such. The main problem was that there was no way to turn it off, it always glowed and was sometimes a bit of a nuisance in movies and other dark places.
This new thing sounds great, a nuclear powered buzzer using piezoelectric materials to produce electrical pulses. They need to improve the efficiency so it can work with something that has a half life measured in years rather than a few months, so you never have to change batteries.
And for the trailers - they are ruly insufferable - hard to believe anyone went to see ANH on the strength of the trailer
I remember seeing the trailer for Star Wars. It was shown with Ralph Bakshi's animated Wizards. I was astonished. It looked fantastic, and I began counting the months until the movie would open.
In those days, the big movies opened narrowly, in just a few theaters, and I and some friends made plans to go downtown and see it in Hollywood. There wasn't that much buzz about the film until a few days before when Time magazine had a big article on it. So that made the lines huge, but we got there early enough and got in.
Shortly before the film began, a guy sitting in the row behind us was talking to his friend. I guess he was in the industry because he'd seen the movie already. He said to his friend, "I really envy everyone here. They're about to see Star Wars for the first time." Then the lights went down, and by the end of the first scene, everyone was cheering. It was amazing.
One really cool technology on the horizon is Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). These will use the 5.9 GHz band for Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC). Basically, cars will talk to each other and to the roadside, exchanging status information relevant to safety and efficiency. You could be alerted to upcoming traffic jams or approaching emergency vehicles. There is also talk about making traffic signals more efficient by letting them know when cars are coming, way in advance.
VANETs are a variant of mobile networking which have plenty of electrical and computational power available at each node, and where node to node distances are typically small. It's an ideal environment for mobile networking.