Everyone loves unlimited bandwidth and being off-the-meter. But by selling bandwidth with zero incremental usage cost, they're really just having the light users subsidize the heavy users. That's what really causes problems like this. Sure, bandwidth is cheap, but the whole reason that they're having problems that require traffic shaping is that their bandwidth is NOT unlimited.
I know consumers (myself included) enjoy not having to think about bandwidth usage, but maybe there could be a better pricing model that more appropriately sets the costs of the bandwidth for heavy users.
Let's just be clear here... while the article and summary are calling it "automated" stats collection, there's still very much a person in the loop at every data collection instant. That is, a human still has to indicate and record any sort of statistically-relevant event. All they've done is to make it so that can go instantly right into a digital form rather than onto a piece of paper.
What would be cool is if the data collection were to be truly automated! Detect all sorts of things unobtrusively, whether through cameras, positioning systems for the ball or the players, etc.
Sure, there's complicated software systems, but when something has to deal with hardware too, there's just a lot more to think about in every action. That's why engineers make abstractions -- enough to keep their part of a particular project in their head.
But shouldn't the "safe mode" limits be independent of the particular operation as much as possible? In software engineering, the people writing test cases are often not the same as the people developing the code, and for the reason that they want to match both to the spec, not to each other.
While the article and summary want to scare IT workers ("Oh, oh -- can you hear your job going away?"), perhaps it's time to get back to the big picture: Information Technology is supposed to help people do their jobs more efficiently. So, while the article does much to suggest that server-side stuff might be getting "outsourced" to the cloud, people still need to interface with it. It'd be nice to see client systems taking steps forward in terms of reliability and ease of use, but nothing monumental is changing on that side of the equation.
But, by outsourcing/concentrating the server-side administration to the "cloud", you might free up IT workers to do less grunt work and do more in terms of process innovations, making the whole enterprise more efficient. IT workers will have to think about how they can make the business operate more efficiently, and be creative and get it implemented. Are today's IT workers ready for that level of thinking?
There are some standards defined for what makes any particular act of copyright violation to be a criminal act. These are clearly defined in 17 USC 506. But to summarize, it requires willful infringement, plus one of either 1) financial gain, 2) total value over $1,000, or 3) pre-release of material in preparation. Criminal infringement does not apply to the casual downloader. There are still valid questions as to whether the punishment matches the crime, but these criminal laws are targeting the big fish.
Something cool is that while traditional semiconductor lasers have an output wavelength that is very much controlled by the bandgap energy of the material, here the laser is substantially tunable by adjusting the plastic's thickness. (Of course, this is just adjusting the energy states too, but it seems more tunable.) From the paper, "Tuning the film thickness (45-160 nm) enabled access to lasing wavelengths across a 45 nm spectral window (434-479 nm)."
While it's not real-time electrical tuning over that kind of bandwidth, it's still pretty cool. Tunability is especially useful for detectors of various chemicals, and now this is getting into the wavelength range where more biological substances start to have their spectrographic signatures.
Shouldn't governments be particularly sensitive about not having a role in picking economic winners and losers?
Beyond that, their stance seems relatively well founded. Take a look at the new privacy policies for Google Health... saying that they might release your records in some situations when required to do so by law.
But, I think the summary doesn't make it sufficiently clear that this is just government IT departments, not all information technology in Canada. Private citizens and businesses can still do as they wish.
There are stories like this all the time, but tech people still have trouble convincing most users that end-to-end encryption is important. How is it that it caught on for the web (credit card payments over SSL), but still barely for personal communications (gpg, encrypted IM)? Even in the situations where it's easy to use encryption, many users still can't be made to care -- especially if it's not something enabled by default. Maybe just that those doing the sniffing are suitably quiet about it... -- Electronics kits for the digital generation.
Battle continues. I'm really tired of this. I've never heard consumers complain about price wars in the past... airlines, PCs, etc.
Isn't that a big part of what capitalism is all about? While there are two competing solutions, since they have many similar features on a technical level, they're forced to compete on price. This tends to be GOOD for the consumer, at least in the short term. (In the longer term, it can be bad as lower margins can squeeze out smaller startup competitors in the field.) -- Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
I've been looking for a new web host recently, and I'm consistently attracted to ones based on the Virtual Private Server concept -- your own box within another box. The multicore economics argument is definitely tied in here, where we can balance demand not just within our own enterprise, but between different consumers of computing time.
Beyond that, I don't really get it... if I have a certain computational workload X, I'd probably prefer to use more cores temporarily rather than pace the work longer over a smaller number of cores. Can they really make the cost incentives enough to fight that? They're really trying to change the model from paying for hardware to paying for cycles, but it's not clear why that should imply a time factor. -- Get your code outside the computer! Microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
I love when I can actually RTFA and still have no idea what the product is. So I found these videos of Jazz which should be helpful. But this is one of those "platform" things where they aren't actually selling anything... But my interpretation is that they're essentially trying to put together a code repository (ala Subversion) with Bugtraq with mailing list with instant message.
If somebody were to take a look at a company that implemented telecommuting, and took a big step back to look at the big picture, there's one big thing that will stand out: the kinds of work that various employees (including those "left behind in the office") do will change because of telecommuting.
With the way that telecommuting has taken hold, it's often the case that the work that needs to be done by department XYZ hasn't changed... but that there are some things that are difficult from remote offices. This means that those parts of the new telecommuter's job will have to be moved to an in-office employee. So yes, it makes sense that telecommuting comes with this price.
The real question is whether companies use telecommuting as a reason to change processes, such that it isn't just redistributing work, but changing the nature of the work itself. Since this article just refers to a single company, it's pretty clear that they haven't thought about redefining processes -- just reassigning work and locations. But hopefully more companies are as they move down this road.
This is a neat concept car. Out of everything I've heard about, the most likely to actually make it to the market is the Terrafugia Transition, which is aimed at people who have both drivers' and pilots' licenses. Not VTOL, but more realistic too.
It's true that corn is a pretty poor feedstock for ethanol generation. But I think most people (farmer subsidy lovers) think that ethanol has come into focus because of its potential as a fuel *replacement* for gasoline.
Let me remind you why we have a demand for ethanol in the first place: a replacement for MTBE, a gasoline anti-knock additive (letting the engine run at higher compression ratios, and thus more efficiently) which was found to be leeching into groundwater and concentrating. MTBE is being phased out, and ethanol is a replacement chemical. Whether or not ethanol will be used as an energy source is irrelevant. It's critical today as a fuel additive for gasoline. Beyond that, it's a pretty inefficient energy carrier. Switchgrass may do better, but we're not there yet.
So EMI will no longer farm out its enforcement duties to the RIAA. That's the entire point of the article. There's nothing to imply that they won't continue to protect their intellectual property. Just don't get all excited, now.
There's a few things that still have to change: 1) Copyright should be reduced in duration. 2) The penalties must be adjusted to be reasonable. 3) People must come to respect the rights of property holders, not violate them blindly. Copyright has lots of negative impliciations when well beyond the term of commercial viability, but I believe that copyright can be adjusted to accomodate both that and the property rights of the creator. 4) Slashdot-crowd must abandon the notion that "not-for-profit" redistribution of someone else's work should be permitted without permission of the rights holder.
If people weren't forced into a single public school system, competing schools could emerge and fill the need for a competent education system. However, as it is, everyone is forced to pay into the failing public system. With vouchers, at least, they could take those education dollars and go elsewhere. And yes, I realize that this is not an easy step to take -- emerging competing schools would require lots of investment. But the point of a free market for just about anything is that people with different needs can find (or create!) different solutions.
Schools aren't like sewers -- there are no physical requirements that there be only one system.
Probably better to use all those mirrors to heat some water and drive a turbine. This may not be the case. Solar traditionally does fairly poorly in thermal systems because of how spread out the energy is. Focusing the energy to yield a higher temperature is possible only with huge arrays of precision mirrors. And without the high temperatures, the thermal to mechanical efficiency must suck at least as much as the Carnot efficiency.
In contrast, the light-driven chemical reaction is NOT limited by Carnot, but of course has its own efficiency associated with it. It depends very much on the specifics of that reaction as to whether it's better or worse than your turbine idea, but it at least does not require expensive solar concentrators.
Don't forget that most open source software comes with big warnings that there are absolutely no warranties. Do most consumers really expect the same from their hardware? While open hardware sounds great for me personally and probably much of the Slashdot crowd, the companies behind it need to have a very different focus than normal mass-market hardware. That is, they either need to choose to offer zero warranties on damage resulting from a user's actions, OR they can put a lot of effort into supporting and encouraging developers (which is what my company chooses to do). I'm not sure if we're ready to have mass-market expectations and developer-friendly devices meet.
Side note: I'm excited about openmoko, the open hardware (and open source software) cell phone. Waiting for the second revision, which will include 802.11.
Can we please redefine copyright law as being applicable only when a protected work is copied between two people? This way, reselling a used CD would still be OK (right of resale, copyright law does not apply). And making a copy from one media format to another, or a temporary copy to RAM, or a backup copy, or transcoding, would all be legal and not under copyright law either, because there would not be any exchange between two people.
I suspect that this is how copyright was originally intended to apply, and I think it makes more sense. Let people do what they want with their media, as long as they don't copy and distribute it to another person. Thats when copyright law should apply.
I am totally shocked that even Diebold could screw up this badly, making systems that crash under normal usage conditions. But the design philosophy they took is the wrong one. Look at the complexity behind these things! Keep it simple and they might have done much better. Why base something like this off of Windows CE? How many megahertz do I need to do a voting machine? Seriously, all of this extra hardware and software means more abstraction (which is considered a good thing in the computer science world), but it also means more abstractions that can be misinterpreted and misused. For a system whose job is so simple, keep the product equally simple.
Re:Pick one: DRM or copyright infringement lawsuit
on
Sony BMG Dropping DRM
·
· Score: 1
You have apparently forgotten that it's we, the people who make up society, that decide what the rules (laws) of the land are going to be! Incorrect. That would be true in a democracy, which this is not and does not pretend to be. The reason the framers of the Constitution rejected democracy (and chose a representative, republican form of government) was because of the "tyranny of the majority". Government exists to protect the negative rights of the minority, too. And the right to property (including intellectual property) is one of those under the 14th Amendment. Removing the protections of intellectual property outright might be convenient for you, and might be convenient for 51% of society, but that's not enough to make it acceptable.
The rule of the majority in direct democracy, as you propose, must be rejected. For example, I suspect that we could get 50% of the people in a particular city to agree that the government should raid the car dealerships and give everyone a brand new car. But that doesn't make it right for that to happen. You're describing "might makes right", which is not the world I want to live in.
Don't voluntarily install untrusted executable files! Period! There is no vulnerability without the user thinking that they want what's inside.
Facebook has nothing to do with the existence of this vulnerability. In fact, the browser-based app model explicitly is nice because of the sandbox effect, where such apps are very limited in what they can touch on your local machine. But when you convince people to break out of that sandbox by installing a local app, you can certainly kiss your computer goodbye.
The real question shouldn't be "who owns the data", but should we encourage webapp providers to create an easy mechanism for import and exporting data? For some webapps it's a no brainer, when it's only one individual's data and there's a great convenience in being able to move formats. But in other cases, such as Facebook, you have to weigh one individual's desire for privacy against others' convenience. That is, while people do share their e-mail address, IM contact info, and sometimes even cell phone numbers, it's hard to believe that they did so with the intention of being sold to marketers or ripped into some other database. That's why Facebook has put e-mail addresses into images for a long time -- it defeats some fraction of potential abusers. So where's the balance?
Take a look at the different candidates on how much influence they want the government to have in your personal life. There is a huge spectrum, both within the Democrats and the Republicans. Video games is only the tip of the iceberg, but is representative of whether people think the federal government needs to act like a protective parent or not. Most of the "establishment" candidates are overwhelmingly tending toward YES on the need for the nanny state, but Clinton is probably the worst. There are alternatives out there. Think about personal liberties, but don't restrict yourself narrowly to the issue of video games.
Just because you might not let your 10-year-old play "Gears of War", does that imply that the government should regulate those games for everyone's "protection"? Or can we separate what we personally think is "right" from what the role of the government (coercive by nature) should be?
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone loves unlimited bandwidth and being off-the-meter. But by selling bandwidth with zero incremental usage cost, they're really just having the light users subsidize the heavy users. That's what really causes problems like this. Sure, bandwidth is cheap, but the whole reason that they're having problems that require traffic shaping is that their bandwidth is NOT unlimited.
I know consumers (myself included) enjoy not having to think about bandwidth usage, but maybe there could be a better pricing model that more appropriately sets the costs of the bandwidth for heavy users.
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics!
Let's just be clear here... while the article and summary are calling it "automated" stats collection, there's still very much a person in the loop at every data collection instant. That is, a human still has to indicate and record any sort of statistically-relevant event. All they've done is to make it so that can go instantly right into a digital form rather than onto a piece of paper.
What would be cool is if the data collection were to be truly automated! Detect all sorts of things unobtrusively, whether through cameras, positioning systems for the ball or the players, etc.
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics!
Sure, there's complicated software systems, but when something has to deal with hardware too, there's just a lot more to think about in every action. That's why engineers make abstractions -- enough to keep their part of a particular project in their head.
But shouldn't the "safe mode" limits be independent of the particular operation as much as possible? In software engineering, the people writing test cases are often not the same as the people developing the code, and for the reason that they want to match both to the spec, not to each other.
--
Hey code monkey... want to learn electronics?
While the article and summary want to scare IT workers ("Oh, oh -- can you hear your job going away?"), perhaps it's time to get back to the big picture: Information Technology is supposed to help people do their jobs more efficiently. So, while the article does much to suggest that server-side stuff might be getting "outsourced" to the cloud, people still need to interface with it. It'd be nice to see client systems taking steps forward in terms of reliability and ease of use, but nothing monumental is changing on that side of the equation.
But, by outsourcing/concentrating the server-side administration to the "cloud", you might free up IT workers to do less grunt work and do more in terms of process innovations, making the whole enterprise more efficient. IT workers will have to think about how they can make the business operate more efficiently, and be creative and get it implemented. Are today's IT workers ready for that level of thinking?
--
Hey code monkey... learn electronics!
There are some standards defined for what makes any particular act of copyright violation to be a criminal act. These are clearly defined in 17 USC 506. But to summarize, it requires willful infringement, plus one of either 1) financial gain, 2) total value over $1,000, or 3) pre-release of material in preparation. Criminal infringement does not apply to the casual downloader. There are still valid questions as to whether the punishment matches the crime, but these criminal laws are targeting the big fish.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation!
The original article is here here.
Something cool is that while traditional semiconductor lasers have an output wavelength that is very much controlled by the bandgap energy of the material, here the laser is substantially tunable by adjusting the plastic's thickness. (Of course, this is just adjusting the energy states too, but it seems more tunable.) From the paper, "Tuning the film thickness (45-160 nm) enabled access to lasing wavelengths across a 45 nm spectral window (434-479 nm)."
While it's not real-time electrical tuning over that kind of bandwidth, it's still pretty cool. Tunability is especially useful for detectors of various chemicals, and now this is getting into the wavelength range where more biological substances start to have their spectrographic signatures.
--
Electronics kits for the digital generation!
Shouldn't governments be particularly sensitive about not having a role in picking economic winners and losers?
Beyond that, their stance seems relatively well founded. Take a look at the new privacy policies for Google Health... saying that they might release your records in some situations when required to do so by law.
But, I think the summary doesn't make it sufficiently clear that this is just government IT departments, not all information technology in Canada. Private citizens and businesses can still do as they wish.
--
Electronics kits for the digital generation.
There are stories like this all the time, but tech people still have trouble convincing most users that end-to-end encryption is important. How is it that it caught on for the web (credit card payments over SSL), but still barely for personal communications (gpg, encrypted IM)? Even in the situations where it's easy to use encryption, many users still can't be made to care -- especially if it's not something enabled by default. Maybe just that those doing the sniffing are suitably quiet about it...
--
Electronics kits for the digital generation.
I saw a video for something called a "LiPo Sack", a bad that people who use these high-density batteries can use to keep the batteries in while they're charging. Cool video of batteries exploding!
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Isn't that a big part of what capitalism is all about? While there are two competing solutions, since they have many similar features on a technical level, they're forced to compete on price. This tends to be GOOD for the consumer, at least in the short term. (In the longer term, it can be bad as lower margins can squeeze out smaller startup competitors in the field.)
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
I've been looking for a new web host recently, and I'm consistently attracted to ones based on the Virtual Private Server concept -- your own box within another box. The multicore economics argument is definitely tied in here, where we can balance demand not just within our own enterprise, but between different consumers of computing time.
Beyond that, I don't really get it... if I have a certain computational workload X, I'd probably prefer to use more cores temporarily rather than pace the work longer over a smaller number of cores. Can they really make the cost incentives enough to fight that? They're really trying to change the model from paying for hardware to paying for cycles, but it's not clear why that should imply a time factor.
--
Get your code outside the computer! Microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
I love when I can actually RTFA and still have no idea what the product is. So I found these videos of Jazz which should be helpful. But this is one of those "platform" things where they aren't actually selling anything... But my interpretation is that they're essentially trying to put together a code repository (ala Subversion) with Bugtraq with mailing list with instant message.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
If somebody were to take a look at a company that implemented telecommuting, and took a big step back to look at the big picture, there's one big thing that will stand out: the kinds of work that various employees (including those "left behind in the office") do will change because of telecommuting.
With the way that telecommuting has taken hold, it's often the case that the work that needs to be done by department XYZ hasn't changed... but that there are some things that are difficult from remote offices. This means that those parts of the new telecommuter's job will have to be moved to an in-office employee. So yes, it makes sense that telecommuting comes with this price.
The real question is whether companies use telecommuting as a reason to change processes, such that it isn't just redistributing work, but changing the nature of the work itself. Since this article just refers to a single company, it's pretty clear that they haven't thought about redefining processes -- just reassigning work and locations. But hopefully more companies are as they move down this road.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
This is a neat concept car. Out of everything I've heard about, the most likely to actually make it to the market is the Terrafugia Transition, which is aimed at people who have both drivers' and pilots' licenses. Not VTOL, but more realistic too.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
It's true that corn is a pretty poor feedstock for ethanol generation. But I think most people (farmer subsidy lovers) think that ethanol has come into focus because of its potential as a fuel *replacement* for gasoline.
Let me remind you why we have a demand for ethanol in the first place: a replacement for MTBE, a gasoline anti-knock additive (letting the engine run at higher compression ratios, and thus more efficiently) which was found to be leeching into groundwater and concentrating. MTBE is being phased out, and ethanol is a replacement chemical. Whether or not ethanol will be used as an energy source is irrelevant. It's critical today as a fuel additive for gasoline. Beyond that, it's a pretty inefficient energy carrier. Switchgrass may do better, but we're not there yet.
--
Electronics kits for the digital generation! Free videos -- click here.
So EMI will no longer farm out its enforcement duties to the RIAA. That's the entire point of the article. There's nothing to imply that they won't continue to protect their intellectual property. Just don't get all excited, now.
There's a few things that still have to change:
1) Copyright should be reduced in duration.
2) The penalties must be adjusted to be reasonable.
3) People must come to respect the rights of property holders, not violate them blindly. Copyright has lots of negative impliciations when well beyond the term of commercial viability, but I believe that copyright can be adjusted to accomodate both that and the property rights of the creator.
4) Slashdot-crowd must abandon the notion that "not-for-profit" redistribution of someone else's work should be permitted without permission of the rights holder.
--
Our microcontroller kit. Your code. Instructional guide and free videos.
If people weren't forced into a single public school system, competing schools could emerge and fill the need for a competent education system. However, as it is, everyone is forced to pay into the failing public system. With vouchers, at least, they could take those education dollars and go elsewhere. And yes, I realize that this is not an easy step to take -- emerging competing schools would require lots of investment. But the point of a free market for just about anything is that people with different needs can find (or create!) different solutions.
Schools aren't like sewers -- there are no physical requirements that there be only one system.
--
Our microcontroller kit. Your code. Learn digital electronics today.
In contrast, the light-driven chemical reaction is NOT limited by Carnot, but of course has its own efficiency associated with it. It depends very much on the specifics of that reaction as to whether it's better or worse than your turbine idea, but it at least does not require expensive solar concentrators.
--
Our microcontroller kit. Your C code. Learn digital electronics today!
Don't forget that most open source software comes with big warnings that there are absolutely no warranties. Do most consumers really expect the same from their hardware? While open hardware sounds great for me personally and probably much of the Slashdot crowd, the companies behind it need to have a very different focus than normal mass-market hardware. That is, they either need to choose to offer zero warranties on damage resulting from a user's actions, OR they can put a lot of effort into supporting and encouraging developers (which is what my company chooses to do). I'm not sure if we're ready to have mass-market expectations and developer-friendly devices meet.
Side note: I'm excited about openmoko, the open hardware (and open source software) cell phone. Waiting for the second revision, which will include 802.11.
--
Our microcontroller kit, guide, and free videos. Your GCC compiler. Learn digital electronics today!
Can we please redefine copyright law as being applicable only when a protected work is copied between two people? This way, reselling a used CD would still be OK (right of resale, copyright law does not apply). And making a copy from one media format to another, or a temporary copy to RAM, or a backup copy, or transcoding, would all be legal and not under copyright law either, because there would not be any exchange between two people.
I suspect that this is how copyright was originally intended to apply, and I think it makes more sense. Let people do what they want with their media, as long as they don't copy and distribute it to another person. Thats when copyright law should apply.
--
Our microcontroller kit. Your gcc compiler. Learn digital elecronics!
I am totally shocked that even Diebold could screw up this badly, making systems that crash under normal usage conditions. But the design philosophy they took is the wrong one. Look at the complexity behind these things! Keep it simple and they might have done much better. Why base something like this off of Windows CE? How many megahertz do I need to do a voting machine? Seriously, all of this extra hardware and software means more abstraction (which is considered a good thing in the computer science world), but it also means more abstractions that can be misinterpreted and misused. For a system whose job is so simple, keep the product equally simple.
--
Coder? Want to learn electronics? Microcontroller kits.
The rule of the majority in direct democracy, as you propose, must be rejected. For example, I suspect that we could get 50% of the people in a particular city to agree that the government should raid the car dealerships and give everyone a brand new car. But that doesn't make it right for that to happen. You're describing "might makes right", which is not the world I want to live in.
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Don't voluntarily install untrusted executable files! Period! There is no vulnerability without the user thinking that they want what's inside.
Facebook has nothing to do with the existence of this vulnerability. In fact, the browser-based app model explicitly is nice because of the sandbox effect, where such apps are very limited in what they can touch on your local machine. But when you convince people to break out of that sandbox by installing a local app, you can certainly kiss your computer goodbye.
--
Our microcontroller kit. Your gcc compiler. Learn digital electronics.
The real question shouldn't be "who owns the data", but should we encourage webapp providers to create an easy mechanism for import and exporting data? For some webapps it's a no brainer, when it's only one individual's data and there's a great convenience in being able to move formats. But in other cases, such as Facebook, you have to weigh one individual's desire for privacy against others' convenience. That is, while people do share their e-mail address, IM contact info, and sometimes even cell phone numbers, it's hard to believe that they did so with the intention of being sold to marketers or ripped into some other database. That's why Facebook has put e-mail addresses into images for a long time -- it defeats some fraction of potential abusers. So where's the balance?
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.
Take a look at the different candidates on how much influence they want the government to have in your personal life. There is a huge spectrum, both within the Democrats and the Republicans. Video games is only the tip of the iceberg, but is representative of whether people think the federal government needs to act like a protective parent or not. Most of the "establishment" candidates are overwhelmingly tending toward YES on the need for the nanny state, but Clinton is probably the worst. There are alternatives out there. Think about personal liberties, but don't restrict yourself narrowly to the issue of video games.
Just because you might not let your 10-year-old play "Gears of War", does that imply that the government should regulate those games for everyone's "protection"? Or can we separate what we personally think is "right" from what the role of the government (coercive by nature) should be?
--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.