The claim section (the only part of the patent that has any legal weight) covers "modifying at least one perceptual attribute of the string of random characters to form a riddle configured to be easily answered by a human being with no advance knowledge of the riddle while being substantially difficult to answer by an automated agent unaided by human being, the string being a correct answer to the riddle; " -- the perceptable attribute that is modified is the readability, and the riddle that the human must solve is the skewed picture.
For the record, those blurred/skewed letters and numbers are called a "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" - Captcha.
When I joined Wikipedia (July, 2003) it had just broken into Alexa's top 1000. Since then, the traffic has doubled every quarter, meaning that it has jumped over 900 places in less than three years (it was at 18 last I checked), and traffic has grown by several orders of magnitude. This article lumps Wikipedia in with blogging, social networking, and local information, but I don't think any of those categories are appropriate. It's a general reference - it just happens to be a particilarly good one, delivering a service that you will not find on Myspace, Blogspot, or a local newspaper site.
Let's say, hypothetically, Allen had died of Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1982, as discussed in the story. At that point, he owned 36% of Microsoft. The shares, as his personal property, would have been deeded out in his will (let's say to hypothetical party X), gone through probate, and then X would have them. How would Balmer and Gates have "gotten them back"?
Also, just taking the above analysis one step further -- let's say our hypothetical jedi cuts through that steel bulkhead in 1 second. That would make the power output of that lightsaber is 100.11 megawatts. For comparison purposes, my city of 28,000+ people drawns about 58 megawatts [on a nice fall day - no heavy load from AC].
Sidenote: How do I know this value off the top of my head? A couple years back, in my parallel architecture class, we were discussing the power requirements of a world-class supercomputer. The rule of thumb is that one requires about as much power as a small city. I was asked to look into this and get real data. Luckily, getting the number wasn't difficult because I happen to know the head sysadmin of the local power company -- his stories always end with something on fire.
The melting temperature of steel is 1370 degrees C (room temperature is 20 degrees), so the the lightsaber has to raise the temperature 1370-20=1350 degrees C).
Now (to pull some numbers out of my ass) let's say our hypothetical jedi swings a 1-meter-long-and-.02-meter-wide lightsaber through a bulkhead in a circular fashion, sweeping out a 120 degree arc. The volume of steel he has to melt is (120/360) * (pi*r^2) *width, where r = 1 meter and width =.02 meters -- 0.0209 cubic meters of steel.
The average density of steel" is 7.85 grams/cubic centimeter. According to google calculator, 1 gram per cubic centimeter equals 1000 kilograms per cubic meter; therefore, 7.85 grams/cubic centimeter = 7850 kilograms/cubic meter.
Thus: the lightsaber must melt (7850 kilograms/cubic meter) * (0.0209 cubic meters) = 164.065 kilograms of steel. This will require (164.065 kilograms) * (452 joules per kilogram per degree C. ) * (1350) = 100112463 joules of energy. QED.
"Why is the assumption that innovation will be followed by excessive litigation?" - Well, for starts, how about because it's demonstrably true? With the availability of the human genome, we should be seeing an EXPLOSION in the number of drug treatments for various diseases. And yet, how many medicines gained FDA approval in 2005 for use on humans? 20. Yep - lowest number ever. And the reason? Pharmasetical companies are content to keep making the drugs they have patents on, and not to any new research.
General purpose does not mean suitable to run every application known to man (by this defintion, there is no such thing as a general purpose architecture, because there is no architecture that can get very good performance on every conceivable application). General purpose means it's not limited to one or a small set of related problems. The signal processor attached to your car's tire (which triggers the anti-lock brakes) is an application-specific processor; a MIPs, Pentium, or Cray architecture is a general purpose architecture.
You missed the point - they *are not* application specific. It's a general purpose architecture designed for running all sorts of scientific applications.
Don't call it "processor package" - it has 80 processors inside of a single integrated circuit, which is called a chip. When the chip is connected with external devices, it's called a board (physical view) or node (logical view).
Yes, I noticed that after I posted my reply. I've fixed the wikipedia article accordingly (I wrote most of it). When I was writing it originally, I got processors and cores confused
I know of a certain project that's working to put over a million cores into a system (160 into a single chip), and it should be finished and available off-the-shelf within a year or so.
Another thing you are underestimating - how many good arabic speakers do you think there are in the US? I heard this statistic a while back - in the US, a country of 300 million people - how many PhDs were awarded in 2004 for Arabic? 10,000? 1,000? No - 6. Arabic speakers are not exactly a dime a dozen, and I suspect a good portion of the ones that do aren't keen to work for the US government.
I suspect most of the naval fatalities over the last 30 years are due primarily to ship-board accidents. The USS Forrestal (CVA 59) was nearly lost due to an accidental misfire on the deck which killed 134 people. Apparently several others have experieneced similiar problems. In 1989, 47 people were killed when a turret exploded (see here).
Realistically, it's far, far too expensive to maintain a modern navy of any size. The age of ship-to-ship combat is over. The nations that have surface ships generally don't use them except as a platform for deploying land forces.
The story says point blank that these are controlled by a human. That makes them no different than the missile-equipped predator aircraft (which have been used in Iraq for years now)
RTFA - "Citrin pointed out that his employment contract permitted him to "destroy" data in the laptop when he left the company. But the 7th Circuit didn't buy it"
"First, SCTP does not support half open connections like TCP, so some applications will not work without modifications." - besides (1) port scanners and similiar tools designed to gather information based on low-level socket behavior, and (2) SYN overflow DOS scripts, I cannot think of a single application that depends on half-open connections. Am I missing an obvious one?
I spent last semester taking a class about the nuts and bolts "Upper layer protocols" class with one of the leading SCTP researchers, so I've heard a good bit about this protocol. It's quite good, better than TCP in almost every respect. The one problem is (as you probably guessed) overcoming the fact that TCP is ubiquitous and has a gigantic code base.
So I asked - why not have an API for translating TCP calls into SCTP? He told me that this is called a "shim" and that one already exists. He also said the primary area of interest regarding the shim was getting the shim working on windows and deployed by default with windows. That would significantly reduce the gap.
Slashdot Mirror
The claim section (the only part of the patent that has any legal weight) covers "modifying at least one perceptual attribute of the string of random characters to form a riddle configured to be easily answered by a human being with no advance knowledge of the riddle while being substantially difficult to answer by an automated agent unaided by human being, the string being a correct answer to the riddle; " -- the perceptable attribute that is modified is the readability, and the riddle that the human must solve is the skewed picture.
...it's patented. (and Turing is spinning in his grave...)
For the record, those blurred/skewed letters and numbers are called a "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" - Captcha.
When I joined Wikipedia (July, 2003) it had just broken into Alexa's top 1000. Since then, the traffic has doubled every quarter, meaning that it has jumped over 900 places in less than three years (it was at 18 last I checked), and traffic has grown by several orders of magnitude. This article lumps Wikipedia in with blogging, social networking, and local information, but I don't think any of those categories are appropriate. It's a general reference - it just happens to be a particilarly good one, delivering a service that you will not find on Myspace, Blogspot, or a local newspaper site.
Let's say, hypothetically, Allen had died of Hodgkin's lymphoma in 1982, as discussed in the story. At that point, he owned 36% of Microsoft. The shares, as his personal property, would have been deeded out in his will (let's say to hypothetical party X), gone through probate, and then X would have them. How would Balmer and Gates have "gotten them back"?
Pffft, the New York Times is clearly superior. They ran fake articles for months before anyone caught on.
"Why couldn't she have been the other kind of mermaid, with the fish half on top and the lady half on the bottom?" -- Fry, Futurama
Also, just taking the above analysis one step further -- let's say our hypothetical jedi cuts through that steel bulkhead in 1 second. That would make the power output of that lightsaber is 100.11 megawatts. For comparison purposes, my city of 28,000+ people drawns about 58 megawatts [on a nice fall day - no heavy load from AC].
Sidenote: How do I know this value off the top of my head? A couple years back, in my parallel architecture class, we were discussing the power requirements of a world-class supercomputer. The rule of thumb is that one requires about as much power as a small city. I was asked to look into this and get real data. Luckily, getting the number wasn't difficult because I happen to know the head sysadmin of the local power company -- his stories always end with something on fire.
The specific heat of steel is 452 joules per kilogram per degree C.
.02 meters -- 0.0209 cubic meters of steel.
The melting temperature of steel is 1370 degrees C (room temperature is 20 degrees), so the the lightsaber has to raise the temperature 1370-20=1350 degrees C).
Now (to pull some numbers out of my ass) let's say our hypothetical jedi swings a 1-meter-long-and-.02-meter-wide lightsaber through a bulkhead in a circular fashion, sweeping out a 120 degree arc. The volume of steel he has to melt is (120/360) * (pi*r^2) *width, where r = 1 meter and width =
The average density of steel" is 7.85 grams/cubic centimeter. According to google calculator, 1 gram per cubic centimeter equals 1000 kilograms per cubic meter; therefore, 7.85 grams/cubic centimeter = 7850 kilograms/cubic meter.
Thus: the lightsaber must melt (7850 kilograms/cubic meter) * (0.0209 cubic meters) = 164.065 kilograms of steel. This will require (164.065 kilograms) * (452 joules per kilogram per degree C. ) * (1350) = 100112463 joules of energy. QED.
"Why is the assumption that innovation will be followed by excessive litigation?" - Well, for starts, how about because it's demonstrably true? With the availability of the human genome, we should be seeing an EXPLOSION in the number of drug treatments for various diseases. And yet, how many medicines gained FDA approval in 2005 for use on humans? 20. Yep - lowest number ever. And the reason? Pharmasetical companies are content to keep making the drugs they have patents on, and not to any new research.
General purpose does not mean suitable to run every application known to man (by this defintion, there is no such thing as a general purpose architecture, because there is no architecture that can get very good performance on every conceivable application). General purpose means it's not limited to one or a small set of related problems. The signal processor attached to your car's tire (which triggers the anti-lock brakes) is an application-specific processor; a MIPs, Pentium, or Cray architecture is a general purpose architecture.
You missed the point - they *are not* application specific. It's a general purpose architecture designed for running all sorts of scientific applications.
Don't call it "processor package" - it has 80 processors inside of a single integrated circuit, which is called a chip. When the chip is connected with external devices, it's called a board (physical view) or node (logical view).
Yes, I noticed that after I posted my reply. I've fixed the wikipedia article accordingly (I wrote most of it). When I was writing it originally, I got processors and cores confused
No, each thread unit (TU) is a core; there are two cores per processor. (and 80 processors per chip)
I know of a certain project that's working to put over a million cores into a system (160 into a single chip), and it should be finished and available off-the-shelf within a year or so.
Another thing you are underestimating - how many good arabic speakers do you think there are in the US? I heard this statistic a while back - in the US, a country of 300 million people - how many PhDs were awarded in 2004 for Arabic? 10,000? 1,000? No - 6. Arabic speakers are not exactly a dime a dozen, and I suspect a good portion of the ones that do aren't keen to work for the US government.
I suspect most of the naval fatalities over the last 30 years are due primarily to ship-board accidents. The USS Forrestal (CVA 59) was nearly lost due to an accidental misfire on the deck which killed 134 people. Apparently several others have experieneced similiar problems. In 1989, 47 people were killed when a turret exploded (see here).
Realistically, it's far, far too expensive to maintain a modern navy of any size. The age of ship-to-ship combat is over. The nations that have surface ships generally don't use them except as a platform for deploying land forces.
Damn! I'm out of mod points. Someone please mod parent up.
The story says point blank that these are controlled by a human. That makes them no different than the missile-equipped predator aircraft (which have been used in Iraq for years now)
RTFA - "Citrin pointed out that his employment contract permitted him to "destroy" data in the laptop when he left the company. But the 7th Circuit didn't buy it"
Ryan Bickhart was my TA a couple years back :) - he's a nice guy
"First, SCTP does not support half open connections like TCP, so some applications will not work without modifications." - besides (1) port scanners and similiar tools designed to gather information based on low-level socket behavior, and (2) SYN overflow DOS scripts, I cannot think of a single application that depends on half-open connections. Am I missing an obvious one?
I spent last semester taking a class about the nuts and bolts "Upper layer protocols" class with one of the leading SCTP researchers, so I've heard a good bit about this protocol. It's quite good, better than TCP in almost every respect. The one problem is (as you probably guessed) overcoming the fact that TCP is ubiquitous and has a gigantic code base.
So I asked - why not have an API for translating TCP calls into SCTP? He told me that this is called a "shim" and that one already exists. He also said the primary area of interest regarding the shim was getting the shim working on windows and deployed by default with windows. That would significantly reduce the gap.
"On Wikipedia, the reward for a job well done is another three jobs." -- David Gerard's law