"Schneier is right that an attack could indeed come anywhere and that it is impossible to defend against them all. Your house could be hit by a tornado, so why do you have smoke alarms? A lock on your door is not going to stop a determined burglar, so why lock your door at all? Why even have a door?"
Your analogies are bogus. Smoke alarms reduce your risk of fire, not just fire caused by tornadoes. Locks reduce your risk of burglary, not just burglary by a determined burglar. Doors do not just stop burglars, but prevent animals and bugs from just walking into your house.
The "Security Theater" we are spending billions on doesn't do anything useful but pretend to stop terrorists.
Actual Cost/Benefit analysis needs to be done on security, and the cost is far higher than the benefit. Even if three or four times the terrorist attacks occurred (which would be hugely tragic! Don't get me wrong!) because we diverted these billions of dollars from "Security Theater" and directed them to our highways and public transportation to reduce traffic deaths by five percent, thousands more people would be alive than sticking to the current approach.
That's because we have only had 3000 deaths in 10 years from terrorism, while we have had 400,000 traffic deaths in the same period.
We don't have enough terrorist numbers to say that the "Security Theater" is effective or isn't effective. Terrorists have targeted planes for almost 50 years, and the latest security was put in place mostly after 2001. The numbers prior and afterwards aren't much different.
Personally, I think the term "Security Theater" is perfect. I think effective security (body scans and computer image recognition) fall outside that term, as they might actually be effective.
I would go further on the ID issue. IDs should be provided via secure sources. Why trust IDs provided by a passenger? A person could be vetted for travel in detail at some security office, and issued a user name or ID number. Providing THAT to security would allow their picture to be viewed and compared to the individual. Doing an ID check once, in detail, by people trained to do so is going to be far more effective then expecting lightly trained individuals to usefully evaluate ID documents over and over every time a person flies.
This is, if tracking the IDs of individuals is really what we want to do.
But these kinds of changes are not "Security Theater." These are changes that make a difference in our security.
Like enabling cell phones on planes. This has been proven to INCREASE security and does not pose any risk to navigation equipment. Yet still, cell phones are not allowed, and planes do not have the technology to enable cell phones in flight.
Personally, I am tired of not being able to take a jar of homemade Jelly on a plane. Tired of leaving my knife at home. Tired of the waits as thousands if not millions of mistakes are made daily by security staff to no ill effect on our security. (My son has flown with a full sized tube of toothpaste, and my wife with a swiss army knife in their carry on bags, which slipped easily through security. All by accident, but stll).
I was simply pondering what sort of representation Angie Langley could make of exactly the actions of hers that you describe, and still be consistent with her PAC filings. I am only saying that just because she "formed the group explicitly to get [Grayson] defeated" does not necessarily restrict the group to this as the "entire purpose" of the PAC. They may very well use the same website and same PAC to attack other democratic congressmen in the future.
As for Grayson's calls for the maximum punishment allowable being "natural", and his letter being the "correct process for deailing with illegal campaigning," it does not necessarily follow that his actions are not stupid.
Just by this fax being Slashdotted, the whole effort to counter Grayson is going to get a shot in the arm. All of the various statements Grayson has made that (right or wrong) make him look nutty will be refreshed in the mind of the public, and his behavior debated. Ms. Langley's purpose is far better served by Grayson taking this bait regardless of any liability Ms. Langley might incur as a result.
I will be interested in how this plays out, but it seems pretty certain Ms. Langley will not spend any time in prison; I'd highly doubt any prosecution occurs at all. She might get her hand slapped, but Grayson's going to take a black eye. Seriously, I have been applauding Grayson for the most part, but take a dim view of people grasping at technicalities to silence opposition and debate.
Anything you do (regardless of how well "within your rights" it might be) is stupid when it does you more damage than your opposition.
I am no lawyer, so I am interested in what anyone that has insight into these particular laws might have to say.
Question: Just because this PAC has chosen this particular congressman to attack, can we infer that the PAC is going to stop with him? Can't they argue that this congressman inspired the concept? That they will move on to other congressmen (men as in mankind, i.e. male or female) later as they too demonstrate they too are "nuts"?
Can't the 'my' then in the domain name refer to all of us that read this site, and contribute to this site over time?
In which case it seems to me that our dear congressmen is attempting to be overly literal and overly strict temporally to claim that the maximum punishment allowed by law should be applied.
You have to insure that the fitness measurements of an individual actually belong to the individual. Haven't read their patent, but I can't see how a game can reasonably do this without some sort of biometric keys.
And what are they going to do about people with medical conditions that might preclude exercise or normal weight? Are they really going to kick people off off the game with cancer because they have no control over their water retention?
All in all, this is a remarkably dumb idea.
It might be better suited for a dating site, using some mechanism to insure that the Avatar for an individual accurately represented basic physical aspects of an individual while preserving mostly their anonymity. Maybe use a Video camera plus some other hardware to scan the individual both to identify them upon logging in and updating their avatar to reflect any changes to their weight/height/BMI/hairline etc.?
Please consider this *publishing* of this idea, and as a result *invalidating any patent* that might build off this stupid Microsoft idea.
Right. And NOBODY is going to be able to deal with 1.5TB video with a $100 drive that only holds 100,000 TB.
And even this fluffy format with be crushed by Moore's law, as long as technology continues to advance as it has in the past. Besides, while the production of content is certain to expand dramatically (as it has over the last century), most of the movies, music, books, etc. which one might put on such a drive will not all exist in only the fluffiest of all possible formats.
Disney is still all about pushing copyright laws ever forward for anything they have ever produced. And all of that content will fit on just a tiny fraction of this $100 dollar drive.
Which is the point. As networks and storage capacity continues to grow exponentially, fluffy media formats make the control of media nearly impossible.
Nobody was making a statement about the format of video that will be in use. In fact, I said, "...it will be more than enough to hold more media of whatever format will be in use in 2025 than a person could reasonably consume in their lifetime."
The point is that $100 100 PB storage is a huge game changer. And if we find a way to burn all that storage with a hugely fluffy format (as we did with CDs), it will just be a matter of a few years and that format too will fall to the storage version of Moore's law.
And exactly what would the 'per capacity tax" be on a $100 drive in 2025, which could be 100 PB (or 100,000 TB, or 100,000,000 GB for the PB or TB challenged) or more?
Canada charges $0.29 per CD (via wikipedia). That's about 48 cents per GB.
I guess the capacity charge would be 50 million dollars per $100 drive?
Free software will not be impacted by the ACTA as these are legal downloads. In other news, all other legal content downloaded will likewise avoid any impact from the ACTA outside of the all so predictable bogus take down notices....
By 2025 (at the current rate of advance sustained over the last 30 years) a TB of disk storage will cost about a penny. For $100, you will be able to buy a hard drive that will hold 2.5 *centuries* of HD video. While that might not be enough to hold all of mankind's copyrighted media, it will be more than enough to hold more media of whatever format will be in use in 2025 than a person could reasonably consume in their lifetime.
The point is, if we copyright any and every scrap of content produced, and maintain the same sorts of restrictions on such content that we enforce at the current time plus all the restrictions of the ACTA.... We will have no legal way to use a storage card we might get as a prize in a Cracker Jack box, much less a drive we actually buy.
And if people can carry around cheap storage sufficiently large to simply clone everyone's media libraries who they might meet, to sort out what they want later, who needs the Internet to "pirate"? (Thus what would be the real use of "Three Strikes"?)
When I write a joke, it is copyrighted. But jokes are so easy to repeat, and so hard to track that there isn't any way I can be paid for each time my joke gets retold. When media becomes easier to pass along than a joke, how can anyone require a payment for each retelling? There are other ways to be compensated, and the entertainment industry is going to have to learn to live with Moore's Law just like any high tech company does. Learn to leverage the efficiencies they gain with better technology to offset the loss of revenue that occurs as technology eliminates sources of income.
Live Concerts, Movie Theaters, endorsement deals, Shirts, and other value adds (plus who-knows what value adds might arise in the future) may be where the entertainment industry will have to go. Cheap (and I don't mean $10, or $5, or even $3) downloads of non DRM movies would bring in plenty of income from those that simply don't want to bother with other services.
Life is tough as technology takes away your income. But we are not going to kill the advance of technology, as much as the entertainment industry would like us to.
Prior Art doesn't give someone a patent or the right to patent. If RealAudio was doing this and publicly documented their process, nobody can patent their process, not even them.
Yeah, but your calculus fails to explain how Oracle can "control" an open source project. The fact that MySQL is an open source project accounts for its high percentage... What is to keep anyone today who uses MySQL from jumping to another distribution, such as Drizzle [https://launchpad.net/drizzle] and MariaDB [http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/MariaDB]?
The fact of the matter is that Brian Aker, Monty Taylor, Jay Pipes, Stewart Smith and others are not working on Sun's distribution today, but on Drizzle. And this development came about long before Oracle's attempt to buy Sun.
Unless there is something mysterious about Databases that is escaping me, that gives Oracle some kind of mysterious mind control over anyone that looks at MySQL source, we are no more in danger of Oracle taking over all the MySQL distributions than we are Novel taking over Linux because it has control of one of the Linux distributions.
If MySQL was proprietary, and Oracle was telling the EU that they would release MySQL under GPL to alleviate the EU's concerns, we would all be going, "Yeah, that fixes everything! MySQL is safe now!". BUT MySQL was already released under GPL!!! And the founders of MySQL are already working on an independent distribution!
This is absolutely stupid. Sorry, your "percentages" are meaningless.
When something strange happens, such as the claim that Oracle will be able to control the database market once they get control of an Open Source project like MySQL.... I have to ask "Who Benefits?"
Why does asking this question get me a Flamebait?
Perhaps I didn't frame the observation clearly.... One possibility requires us to identify who benefits in the market by slowing down this merger? Well, IBM does. They are making offers to any and all engineers away from Sun. They are offering specials to replace Sun hardware with IBM hardware. Oracle has been forced to take out ads to shore up their customer base, assuring them that Oracle will continue to deliver Sun hardware. Is it really so far out to think they might lobby the EU to drag its feet?
Could some other company besides IBM be pushing to resist the merger? Sure. Maybe Hp? Microsoft? But I think IBM is the best guess I can come up with.
The other possibility is that there are political points to be scored by poking a set of American companies in the eye. Folks want to pretend that is outlandish, well, you have that right. But the evidence is pretty clear that the EU can approve mergers when it is in their own (at least perceived) best interests, as in the case with Airbus. And while not technically EU, Norway's grant of a Peace Price to Obama certainly demonstrates a regional ability to value politics over logic.
It would be different if the EU had explained even once how a project under GPL could be squashed by a Sun Oracle merger. Or how we are going to be so much better off if Sun sets and gets sold off in a fire sale.
IBM may be doing what they can to stir the pot on this. With each delay, Sun's survival is more in question, and more business can be sucked away from Sun by IBM.
The objection (that Oracle will have "control" of an Open Source product like MySQL) is absolutely absurd. First of all, there is nothing Oracle can do to prevent others from continuing to update and support MySQL under GPL. Many Open Source projects continue under GPL. MySQL has a huge "out of Oracle's reach" GPL effort already.
Secondly, the database market is dynamic with many new competitors entering the field. MySQL as a relational database faces competition from a host of nonSQL databases whose performance and capacity relational databases cannot match.
The real problem with the merger is politics for profit and spite. Heaven forbid the EU allows two American companies to merge. The EU likes to keep their own mergers to a minimum.... like with Airbus?
Sorry, there isn't any proof you can do this either... In his books the threat to the predictions is "the Mule" who can force upon others his desired emotional states.... In fact we don't need "Mules" with mental powers. Charismatic leaders disrupt such assumptions and predictions all the time without the need for mental powers.
"computers think deterministically..."
Sorry, even this is not true. What a computer does is often based on random data, the inputs into the system and the timing of said inputs. What, have we learned nothing from using computers since the 50's? Just because a program crashes on you, doesn't mean that you can't do exactly the same steps and perhaps have the program continue on....
Lastly, we do not need to consider the "soul" to consider the question of Free Will. Of course people cannot change their past behavior, and there is no need to do so in order to discuss Free Will. The question is whether or not people can choose to change their behavior, and thus choose their future behavior.
In the end, it cannot be denied that one will live only one life that we can observe. That does not prove that the other paths were not possible, nor does that prove those paths could be predicted solely from the state of the universe at a point prior to those decisions.
A Mesh Network running on various home and mobile devices could be used to provide "free" Internet and phone services. Those that are willing to pay for a traditional Internet connection could hook up "gateways" for the Mesh Network to connect to the Internet (and thus VOIP) services. Like other posters note, this does consume battery/power/bandwidth, so it isn't exactly *free*. However, the more nodes on the network, the more capacity the network has (particularly if the devices can transmit with less power when close to other nodes). Nor would any node need to do any transmissions if a "grounded" node (one plugged into some reliable power source) can handle the traffic. A protocol could be developed to have nodes intelligently manage their power available/ transmission obligation trade offs. At least in dense node population situations.
There is no doubt that a back bone is needed to carry traffic distances. But like mass transit, the last mile is kinda a problem. A mesh network would be a great way to smooth out some of those "last mile" issues, provide coverage where coverage is spotty, and empower regular people to fix environments to work well. That's a huge step up from having to wait on your cell phone provider/ prison warden to decide to fix access.
... Like Math, History, Chemistry, Literature, Writing, Reading, and we waste time with spelling tests and teaching cursive. Nobody is going to be less successful in life because they completely muff this particular skill and print all their lives. Even spelling can be taught via writing on a computer and using the spell checker. Seriously, I never did learn to spell despite spelling tests all through grade school, Junior high, high school, and into college. But now, just so as to avoid those annoying red lines, I actually spell pretty well.
And I certainly write faster than I ever could writing cursive.
As long as I am typing.
Give me a pencil and paper, and I still can't spell my way out of a wet paper bag.
So what? Why did I waste all that time trying to learn these things that just didn't matter, long term? Sure, SOME time needs to be spent. We need SOME basic ability to spell. Certainly we need vocabulary (something I never had trouble with). And how to write. But it is just stupid to artificially make learning harder for kids, "because that's the way it has always been done".
We have loads of important information to stuff in the heads of kids today. We need to even teach them to go outside and play games. Junk this stuff with quilting and parchment paper.
I got laid off once when the old boss died, and the new boss thought I was too tight with the old "administration". After I was gone, the lay offs were done. Go figure.
Later I got fired from Microsoft. Microsoft's corporate culture is about a grading curve. No matter how good your team is, no matter how successful they are, some get "A"s, some "C"s, some "D"s, and some Fail. You get an "A" and (at the time) you could be rich beyond your dreams. You fail, and you are asked to leave.
This makes life at work brutal, because helping others be productive doesn't get you a great grade unless you can clearly claim credit. Furthermore, making use of someone else's advances in an obvious way is going to count for them, so you don't do it. Bottom line, it makes a very productive environment cause deadwood gets tossed. But if you survive a few years, you do so because you can develop an "in" with those that grade you, and you increasingly get grades partly (but almost never solely) because of who likes you.
The bottom line is that your first year is absolutely critical. You are almost never going to get an "A" cause you don't have the "In"s for that. But you can't fall down in visibility or you are toast.
Now it happened that my Dad died the first year I was working there. It was a long and drawn out process with cancer. I took several trips during the year to be with him when things got bad. And for the funeral. And I found it tough to talk to people. Then I had a meeting with my group leader, a guy who laughed nearly constantly but paradoxically had no sense of humor what so ever. We met in a conference room outside the doors of the building, and I was told to simply leave. My stuff would be sent to me.
After being tossed out the door, the project lead told me, "My dad died, and it didn't hurt my productivity."
The bottom line is that I MIGHT have avoided this had I spent more time talking up and down the chain of command about what I was going through. I could have taken leave until I had my head back together. The environment made it tough to get any support from people around me at work, but I might have worked harder at that. But it is also possible that some situations just are not going to be within your ability to manage.
We live in Austin, and my 22 year old daughter was studying for her college finals, in her own duplex, and got into an argument with her boy friend. Irrationally, she called the cops, and the boy friend left.
The cops come, demand to come to look for the boy friend. She refuses, and they end up tasering her twice, arresting her for obstructing an officer in his duty and resisting arrest.
This because, when they entered her home without a warrant, they refused to let her secure her great dane and she was beside herself that they would shoot the dog (which doesn't like anyone in a uniform). Luckily, the dog did nothing.
Then for her safety, they released her at 4:30 am in downtown Austin barefoot with no ability to call anyone (you can only make collect calls to land lines, and none of her friends, nor myself, or anyone local she knows has a land line anymore). So I get a call at 5:15 when she borrows a cell phone from a construction worker.
Perhaps these are the kinds of "lies" the Austin police doesn't like posting. Personally, I wish they were lies. Just like the Grandmother that they tased on hyw 71, there are times when people act like idiots, angry and irrational. But in these situations, it is the POLICE that are supposed to act like trained professionals. If they are not in danger from a person who physically cannot harm them (a 70 year old grandmother, or a 22 year old girl screaming "don't shoot my dog!"), then they have no reason to taser some one. They are going to kill someone, and there isn't any reason for it.
Oh, I'd post the Police video from my daughter's encounter with the cops. BUT it seems they "lost" it.
I would guess it's because he is using "open source farming" instead of GM (sterile) hybrids his seeds for next year are a portion of this year's crop.
Even so, there is a preciously small chance of mutating (via microwave radiation from a cell tower) the germ cells of an annual plant such that an altered, viable seed results. Or perhaps to put it more clearly, this happens all the time for a host of factors such that microwave radiation from a cell tower is going to be down in the noise as a cause of mutation.
Furthermore, most farmers I know buy seed each year, even if the crop isn't "GM (sterile)". (Just because a crop is GM doesn't mean it is sterile, BTW. The sterile nature of some GM crops is just a "feature" which requires farmers to buy seed stock for each crop, as I understand it.)
I think we should study the effects of Microwave towers. To date, we have no evidence that the towers are harmful, based on a number of studies. I do not think we have laid this issue to rest, since what frequencies we use, and how we transmit them is still a matter of rapid change.
In this case, the fellow's objections shouldn't carry too much weight. That is because, as a reasonable matter of policy, we haven't anything to support his fears other than the fact that he does indeed have fears of radiation. But we should study the issue, because, while we have no reason to think he is right to be fearful, we don't have enough information to say categorically that he wrong.
Policy ought to be based on the best information we have, yet we should work to make sure we have better information in the future just in case the best information we have might possibly have missed a significant risk.
Regardless of what people THINK the effect of microwave towers can or cannot have, the real need is to study such questions. Of course, we can't study every stupid thing that someone might think (such as a person I know that feels that the radiation from Toll Booth RFID tags are giving her headaches), Microwave towers 1) use a significant amount of power, and 2) potentially impact large numbers of people.
I was one of the first to laugh at a cell phone/brain cancer link. Yet a recent study demonstrates a statistically significant rise in risk (though the actual impact of a 90% increase in risk for a very rare brain cancer may not really be a risk that one should necessarily worry about).
The point is, at some level, there is some evidence that microwave radiation in the ranges used by cell phones (roughly 380 mhz to 2 mhz) may have some effect on organisms.
Now, assuming that the fellow reseeds his crop each year (garlic is an annual, after all), one wonders why he is all that worried in any event.
.... Their threaded design provides more threads and cores per Watt than other processors, and designs under development is pushing the further in that direction. And at this point, I am not aware of any Linux distribution that supports Niagara (though there may very well be one).
Databases do not benefit as much by fast single thread execution as they do by very reasonable multi-thread execution. That is because in a database application, or Web application, you want to support many sessions.
And as power and heat become issues in large server farms (mostly running database and web applications), the Niagara line is attractive.... The problem hasn't really been Sun's technology, but Sun's marketing and unfocused management. Larry might be a jerk, but he does know how to focus on making money.
I read through the comments, but can't claim I read every one. But of those I read, I didn't see anyone who pointed out that the guy in the training is showing you a WEB SITE...
BUT all the answers are about the risks of P2P applications ?!?!?
If you are going to a WEB SITE to download music, isn't the P2P application your browser!?!?!
Slashdot Mirror
"Schneier is right that an attack could indeed come anywhere and that it is impossible to defend against them all. Your house could be hit by a tornado, so why do you have smoke alarms? A lock on your door is not going to stop a determined burglar, so why lock your door at all? Why even have a door?"
Your analogies are bogus. Smoke alarms reduce your risk of fire, not just fire caused by tornadoes. Locks reduce your risk of burglary, not just burglary by a determined burglar. Doors do not just stop burglars, but prevent animals and bugs from just walking into your house.
The "Security Theater" we are spending billions on doesn't do anything useful but pretend to stop terrorists.
Actual Cost/Benefit analysis needs to be done on security, and the cost is far higher than the benefit. Even if three or four times the terrorist attacks occurred (which would be hugely tragic! Don't get me wrong!) because we diverted these billions of dollars from "Security Theater" and directed them to our highways and public transportation to reduce traffic deaths by five percent, thousands more people would be alive than sticking to the current approach.
That's because we have only had 3000 deaths in 10 years from terrorism, while we have had 400,000 traffic deaths in the same period.
We don't have enough terrorist numbers to say that the "Security Theater" is effective or isn't effective. Terrorists have targeted planes for almost 50 years, and the latest security was put in place mostly after 2001. The numbers prior and afterwards aren't much different.
Personally, I think the term "Security Theater" is perfect. I think effective security (body scans and computer image recognition) fall outside that term, as they might actually be effective.
I would go further on the ID issue. IDs should be provided via secure sources. Why trust IDs provided by a passenger? A person could be vetted for travel in detail at some security office, and issued a user name or ID number. Providing THAT to security would allow their picture to be viewed and compared to the individual. Doing an ID check once, in detail, by people trained to do so is going to be far more effective then expecting lightly trained individuals to usefully evaluate ID documents over and over every time a person flies.
This is, if tracking the IDs of individuals is really what we want to do.
But these kinds of changes are not "Security Theater." These are changes that make a difference in our security.
Like enabling cell phones on planes. This has been proven to INCREASE security and does not pose any risk to navigation equipment. Yet still, cell phones are not allowed, and planes do not have the technology to enable cell phones in flight.
Personally, I am tired of not being able to take a jar of homemade Jelly on a plane. Tired of leaving my knife at home. Tired of the waits as thousands if not millions of mistakes are made daily by security staff to no ill effect on our security. (My son has flown with a full sized tube of toothpaste, and my wife with a swiss army knife in their carry on bags, which slipped easily through security. All by accident, but stll).
I was simply pondering what sort of representation Angie Langley could make of exactly the actions of hers that you describe, and still be consistent with her PAC filings. I am only saying that just because she "formed the group explicitly to get [Grayson] defeated" does not necessarily restrict the group to this as the "entire purpose" of the PAC. They may very well use the same website and same PAC to attack other democratic congressmen in the future.
As for Grayson's calls for the maximum punishment allowable being "natural", and his letter being the "correct process for deailing with illegal campaigning," it does not necessarily follow that his actions are not stupid.
Just by this fax being Slashdotted, the whole effort to counter Grayson is going to get a shot in the arm. All of the various statements Grayson has made that (right or wrong) make him look nutty will be refreshed in the mind of the public, and his behavior debated. Ms. Langley's purpose is far better served by Grayson taking this bait regardless of any liability Ms. Langley might incur as a result.
I will be interested in how this plays out, but it seems pretty certain Ms. Langley will not spend any time in prison; I'd highly doubt any prosecution occurs at all. She might get her hand slapped, but Grayson's going to take a black eye. Seriously, I have been applauding Grayson for the most part, but take a dim view of people grasping at technicalities to silence opposition and debate.
Anything you do (regardless of how well "within your rights" it might be) is stupid when it does you more damage than your opposition.
I am no lawyer, so I am interested in what anyone that has insight into these particular laws might have to say.
Question: Just because this PAC has chosen this particular congressman to attack, can we infer that the PAC is going to stop with him? Can't they argue that this congressman inspired the concept? That they will move on to other congressmen (men as in mankind, i.e. male or female) later as they too demonstrate they too are "nuts"?
Can't the 'my' then in the domain name refer to all of us that read this site, and contribute to this site over time?
In which case it seems to me that our dear congressmen is attempting to be overly literal and overly strict temporally to claim that the maximum punishment allowed by law should be applied.
Oh, and he is being stupid.
Not all kettles are black: http://tinyurl.com/blackpotkettle
In fact, it seems that "black" pots and kettles can claim to be a minority even in the kitchen.
You have to insure that the fitness measurements of an individual actually belong to the individual. Haven't read their patent, but I can't see how a game can reasonably do this without some sort of biometric keys.
And what are they going to do about people with medical conditions that might preclude exercise or normal weight? Are they really going to kick people off off the game with cancer because they have no control over their water retention?
All in all, this is a remarkably dumb idea.
It might be better suited for a dating site, using some mechanism to insure that the Avatar for an individual accurately represented basic physical aspects of an individual while preserving mostly their anonymity. Maybe use a Video camera plus some other hardware to scan the individual both to identify them upon logging in and updating their avatar to reflect any changes to their weight/height/BMI/hairline etc.?
Please consider this *publishing* of this idea, and as a result *invalidating any patent* that might build off this stupid Microsoft idea.
Right. And NOBODY is going to be able to deal with 1.5TB video with a $100 drive that only holds 100,000 TB.
And even this fluffy format with be crushed by Moore's law, as long as technology continues to advance as it has in the past. Besides, while the production of content is certain to expand dramatically (as it has over the last century), most of the movies, music, books, etc. which one might put on such a drive will not all exist in only the fluffiest of all possible formats.
Disney is still all about pushing copyright laws ever forward for anything they have ever produced. And all of that content will fit on just a tiny fraction of this $100 dollar drive.
Which is the point. As networks and storage capacity continues to grow exponentially, fluffy media formats make the control of media nearly impossible.
Nobody was making a statement about the format of video that will be in use. In fact, I said, "...it will be more than enough to hold more media of whatever format will be in use in 2025 than a person could reasonably consume in their lifetime."
The point is that $100 100 PB storage is a huge game changer. And if we find a way to burn all that storage with a hugely fluffy format (as we did with CDs), it will just be a matter of a few years and that format too will fall to the storage version of Moore's law.
And exactly what would the 'per capacity tax" be on a $100 drive in 2025, which could be 100 PB (or 100,000 TB, or 100,000,000 GB for the PB or TB challenged) or more?
Canada charges $0.29 per CD (via wikipedia). That's about 48 cents per GB.
I guess the capacity charge would be 50 million dollars per $100 drive?
Yeah, that would work.
Free software will not be impacted by the ACTA as these are legal downloads. In other news, all other legal content downloaded will likewise avoid any impact from the ACTA outside of the all so predictable bogus take down notices....
By 2025 (at the current rate of advance sustained over the last 30 years) a TB of disk storage will cost about a penny. For $100, you will be able to buy a hard drive that will hold 2.5 *centuries* of HD video. While that might not be enough to hold all of mankind's copyrighted media, it will be more than enough to hold more media of whatever format will be in use in 2025 than a person could reasonably consume in their lifetime.
http://brownzings.blogspot.com/2009/11/disruptive-change.html
The point is, if we copyright any and every scrap of content produced, and maintain the same sorts of restrictions on such content that we enforce at the current time plus all the restrictions of the ACTA.... We will have no legal way to use a storage card we might get as a prize in a Cracker Jack box, much less a drive we actually buy.
And if people can carry around cheap storage sufficiently large to simply clone everyone's media libraries who they might meet, to sort out what they want later, who needs the Internet to "pirate"? (Thus what would be the real use of "Three Strikes"?)
When I write a joke, it is copyrighted. But jokes are so easy to repeat, and so hard to track that there isn't any way I can be paid for each time my joke gets retold. When media becomes easier to pass along than a joke, how can anyone require a payment for each retelling? There are other ways to be compensated, and the entertainment industry is going to have to learn to live with Moore's Law just like any high tech company does. Learn to leverage the efficiencies they gain with better technology to offset the loss of revenue that occurs as technology eliminates sources of income.
Live Concerts, Movie Theaters, endorsement deals, Shirts, and other value adds (plus who-knows what value adds might arise in the future) may be where the entertainment industry will have to go. Cheap (and I don't mean $10, or $5, or even $3) downloads of non DRM movies would bring in plenty of income from those that simply don't want to bother with other services.
Life is tough as technology takes away your income. But we are not going to kill the advance of technology, as much as the entertainment industry would like us to.
Prior Art doesn't give someone a patent or the right to patent. If RealAudio was doing this and publicly documented their process, nobody can patent their process, not even them.
Yeah, but your calculus fails to explain how Oracle can "control" an open source project. The fact that MySQL is an open source project accounts for its high percentage... What is to keep anyone today who uses MySQL from jumping to another distribution, such as Drizzle [https://launchpad.net/drizzle] and
MariaDB [http://askmonty.org/wiki/index.php/MariaDB]?
The fact of the matter is that Brian Aker, Monty Taylor, Jay Pipes, Stewart Smith and others are not working on Sun's distribution today, but on Drizzle. And this development came about long before Oracle's attempt to buy Sun.
Unless there is something mysterious about Databases that is escaping me, that gives Oracle some kind of mysterious mind control over anyone that looks at MySQL source, we are no more in danger of Oracle taking over all the MySQL distributions than we are Novel taking over Linux because it has control of one of the Linux distributions.
If MySQL was proprietary, and Oracle was telling the EU that they would release MySQL under GPL to alleviate the EU's concerns, we would all be going, "Yeah, that fixes everything! MySQL is safe now!". BUT MySQL was already released under GPL!!! And the founders of MySQL are already working on an independent distribution!
This is absolutely stupid. Sorry, your "percentages" are meaningless.
When something strange happens, such as the claim that Oracle will be able to control the database market once they get control of an Open Source project like MySQL .... I have to ask "Who Benefits?"
Why does asking this question get me a Flamebait?
Perhaps I didn't frame the observation clearly.... One possibility requires us to identify who benefits in the market by slowing down this merger? Well, IBM does. They are making offers to any and all engineers away from Sun. They are offering specials to replace Sun hardware with IBM hardware. Oracle has been forced to take out ads to shore up their customer base, assuring them that Oracle will continue to deliver Sun hardware. Is it really so far out to think they might lobby the EU to drag its feet?
Could some other company besides IBM be pushing to resist the merger? Sure. Maybe Hp? Microsoft? But I think IBM is the best guess I can come up with.
The other possibility is that there are political points to be scored by poking a set of American companies in the eye. Folks want to pretend that is outlandish, well, you have that right. But the evidence is pretty clear that the EU can approve mergers when it is in their own (at least perceived) best interests, as in the case with Airbus. And while not technically EU, Norway's grant of a Peace Price to Obama certainly demonstrates a regional ability to value politics over logic.
It would be different if the EU had explained even once how a project under GPL could be squashed by a Sun Oracle merger. Or how we are going to be so much better off if Sun sets and gets sold off in a fire sale.
IBM may be doing what they can to stir the pot on this. With each delay, Sun's survival is more in question, and more business can be sucked away from Sun by IBM.
The objection (that Oracle will have "control" of an Open Source product like MySQL) is absolutely absurd. First of all, there is nothing Oracle can do to prevent others from continuing to update and support MySQL under GPL. Many Open Source projects continue under GPL. MySQL has a huge "out of Oracle's reach" GPL effort already.
Secondly, the database market is dynamic with many new competitors entering the field. MySQL as a relational database faces competition from a host of nonSQL databases whose performance and capacity relational databases cannot match.
The real problem with the merger is politics for profit and spite. Heaven forbid the EU allows two American companies to merge. The EU likes to keep their own mergers to a minimum .... like with Airbus?
"except en mass aka Asimov's Foundation books..."
Sorry, there isn't any proof you can do this either... In his books the threat to the predictions is "the Mule" who can force upon others his desired emotional states.... In fact we don't need "Mules" with mental powers. Charismatic leaders disrupt such assumptions and predictions all the time without the need for mental powers.
"computers think deterministically..."
Sorry, even this is not true. What a computer does is often based on random data, the inputs into the system and the timing of said inputs. What, have we learned nothing from using computers since the 50's? Just because a program crashes on you, doesn't mean that you can't do exactly the same steps and perhaps have the program continue on....
Lastly, we do not need to consider the "soul" to consider the question of Free Will. Of course people cannot change their past behavior, and there is no need to do so in order to discuss Free Will. The question is whether or not people can choose to change their behavior, and thus choose their future behavior.
In the end, it cannot be denied that one will live only one life that we can observe. That does not prove that the other paths were not possible, nor does that prove those paths could be predicted solely from the state of the universe at a point prior to those decisions.
A Mesh Network running on various home and mobile devices could be used to provide "free" Internet and phone services. Those that are willing to pay for a traditional Internet connection could hook up "gateways" for the Mesh Network to connect to the Internet (and thus VOIP) services. Like other posters note, this does consume battery/power/bandwidth, so it isn't exactly *free*. However, the more nodes on the network, the more capacity the network has (particularly if the devices can transmit with less power when close to other nodes). Nor would any node need to do any transmissions if a "grounded" node (one plugged into some reliable power source) can handle the traffic. A protocol could be developed to have nodes intelligently manage their power available/ transmission obligation trade offs. At least in dense node population situations.
There is no doubt that a back bone is needed to carry traffic distances. But like mass transit, the last mile is kinda a problem. A mesh network would be a great way to smooth out some of those "last mile" issues, provide coverage where coverage is spotty, and empower regular people to fix environments to work well. That's a huge step up from having to wait on your cell phone provider/ prison warden to decide to fix access.
... Like Math, History, Chemistry, Literature, Writing, Reading, and we waste time with spelling tests and teaching cursive. Nobody is going to be less successful in life because they completely muff this particular skill and print all their lives. Even spelling can be taught via writing on a computer and using the spell checker. Seriously, I never did learn to spell despite spelling tests all through grade school, Junior high, high school, and into college. But now, just so as to avoid those annoying red lines, I actually spell pretty well.
And I certainly write faster than I ever could writing cursive.
As long as I am typing.
Give me a pencil and paper, and I still can't spell my way out of a wet paper bag.
So what? Why did I waste all that time trying to learn these things that just didn't matter, long term? Sure, SOME time needs to be spent. We need SOME basic ability to spell. Certainly we need vocabulary (something I never had trouble with). And how to write. But it is just stupid to artificially make learning harder for kids, "because that's the way it has always been done".
We have loads of important information to stuff in the heads of kids today. We need to even teach them to go outside and play games. Junk this stuff with quilting and parchment paper.
I got laid off once when the old boss died, and the new boss thought I was too tight with the old "administration". After I was gone, the lay offs were done. Go figure.
Later I got fired from Microsoft. Microsoft's corporate culture is about a grading curve. No matter how good your team is, no matter how successful they are, some get "A"s, some "C"s, some "D"s, and some Fail. You get an "A" and (at the time) you could be rich beyond your dreams. You fail, and you are asked to leave.
This makes life at work brutal, because helping others be productive doesn't get you a great grade unless you can clearly claim credit. Furthermore, making use of someone else's advances in an obvious way is going to count for them, so you don't do it. Bottom line, it makes a very productive environment cause deadwood gets tossed. But if you survive a few years, you do so because you can develop an "in" with those that grade you, and you increasingly get grades partly (but almost never solely) because of who likes you.
The bottom line is that your first year is absolutely critical. You are almost never going to get an "A" cause you don't have the "In"s for that. But you can't fall down in visibility or you are toast.
Now it happened that my Dad died the first year I was working there. It was a long and drawn out process with cancer. I took several trips during the year to be with him when things got bad. And for the funeral. And I found it tough to talk to people. Then I had a meeting with my group leader, a guy who laughed nearly constantly but paradoxically had no sense of humor what so ever. We met in a conference room outside the doors of the building, and I was told to simply leave. My stuff would be sent to me.
After being tossed out the door, the project lead told me, "My dad died, and it didn't hurt my productivity."
The bottom line is that I MIGHT have avoided this had I spent more time talking up and down the chain of command about what I was going through. I could have taken leave until I had my head back together. The environment made it tough to get any support from people around me at work, but I might have worked harder at that. But it is also possible that some situations just are not going to be within your ability to manage.
Yeah, and who decides if people are posting lies?
We live in Austin, and my 22 year old daughter was studying for her college finals, in her own duplex, and got into an argument with her boy friend. Irrationally, she called the cops, and the boy friend left.
The cops come, demand to come to look for the boy friend. She refuses, and they end up tasering her twice, arresting her for obstructing an officer in his duty and resisting arrest.
This because, when they entered her home without a warrant, they refused to let her secure her great dane and she was beside herself that they would shoot the dog (which doesn't like anyone in a uniform). Luckily, the dog did nothing.
Then for her safety, they released her at 4:30 am in downtown Austin barefoot with no ability to call anyone (you can only make collect calls to land lines, and none of her friends, nor myself, or anyone local she knows has a land line anymore). So I get a call at 5:15 when she borrows a cell phone from a construction worker.
Perhaps these are the kinds of "lies" the Austin police doesn't like posting. Personally, I wish they were lies. Just like the Grandmother that they tased on hyw 71, there are times when people act like idiots, angry and irrational. But in these situations, it is the POLICE that are supposed to act like trained professionals. If they are not in danger from a person who physically cannot harm them (a 70 year old grandmother, or a 22 year old girl screaming "don't shoot my dog!"), then they have no reason to taser some one. They are going to kill someone, and there isn't any reason for it.
Oh, I'd post the Police video from my daughter's encounter with the cops. BUT it seems they "lost" it.
Right.
I would guess it's because he is using "open source farming" instead of GM (sterile) hybrids his seeds for next year are a portion of this year's crop.
Even so, there is a preciously small chance of mutating (via microwave radiation from a cell tower) the germ cells of an annual plant such that an altered, viable seed results. Or perhaps to put it more clearly, this happens all the time for a host of factors such that microwave radiation from a cell tower is going to be down in the noise as a cause of mutation.
Furthermore, most farmers I know buy seed each year, even if the crop isn't "GM (sterile)". (Just because a crop is GM doesn't mean it is sterile, BTW. The sterile nature of some GM crops is just a "feature" which requires farmers to buy seed stock for each crop, as I understand it.)
I think we should study the effects of Microwave towers. To date, we have no evidence that the towers are harmful, based on a number of studies. I do not think we have laid this issue to rest, since what frequencies we use, and how we transmit them is still a matter of rapid change.
In this case, the fellow's objections shouldn't carry too much weight. That is because, as a reasonable matter of policy, we haven't anything to support his fears other than the fact that he does indeed have fears of radiation. But we should study the issue, because, while we have no reason to think he is right to be fearful, we don't have enough information to say categorically that he wrong.
Policy ought to be based on the best information we have, yet we should work to make sure we have better information in the future just in case the best information we have might possibly have missed a significant risk.
Regardless of what people THINK the effect of microwave towers can or cannot have, the real need is to study such questions. Of course, we can't study every stupid thing that someone might think (such as a person I know that feels that the radiation from Toll Booth RFID tags are giving her headaches), Microwave towers 1) use a significant amount of power, and 2) potentially impact large numbers of people.
I was one of the first to laugh at a cell phone/brain cancer link. Yet a recent study demonstrates a statistically significant rise in risk (though the actual impact of a 90% increase in risk for a very rare brain cancer may not really be a risk that one should necessarily worry about).
The point is, at some level, there is some evidence that microwave radiation in the ranges used by cell phones (roughly 380 mhz to 2 mhz) may have some effect on organisms.
Now, assuming that the fellow reseeds his crop each year (garlic is an annual, after all), one wonders why he is all that worried in any event.
Perhaps he should have said "approaches a usable resolution..."
Still, the point is valid. A 1.2 MP camera is really useless. 5 MP is pretty reasonable.
.... Their threaded design provides more threads and cores per Watt than other processors, and designs under development is pushing the further in that direction. And at this point, I am not aware of any Linux distribution that supports Niagara (though there may very well be one).
Databases do not benefit as much by fast single thread execution as they do by very reasonable multi-thread execution. That is because in a database application, or Web application, you want to support many sessions.
And as power and heat become issues in large server farms (mostly running database and web applications), the Niagara line is attractive.... The problem hasn't really been Sun's technology, but Sun's marketing and unfocused management. Larry might be a jerk, but he does know how to focus on making money.
I read through the comments, but can't claim I read every one. But of those I read, I didn't see anyone who pointed out that the guy in the training is showing you a WEB SITE...
BUT all the answers are about the risks of P2P applications ?!?!?
If you are going to a WEB SITE to download music, isn't the P2P application your browser!?!?!