What you have said is consistent with Reed's arguments.
Mixing is a property of distortion in the receiving and transmitting equipment, not the basic physics of propagation. Reed would argue the solution is to build better, more linear, equipment. Yes, in practise there is a limit as to how good a piece of equipment we can build, but the limit is getting better all the time, so it is not a fundamental limitation.
... The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but reserves all other copyright rights whatsoever.
The file of this patent contains at least one drawing executed in color....
Does this mean you can scan the image from the patent and use it as an icon?
I can hear the defence in court now..."No your honour I didn't copy their icon, I copied their patent".
I have heard of a student in a first year uni course walking into the lab, pulling a 5 1/4" floppy disk from his packet UNFOLDING it and putting it in a drive. Needless to say, the rest of the room was howling with laughter. The laughter was short lived when the floppy disk worked!
> The most important threat to the survival of free software is the concept of "trusted computing," which really means the building of hardware you as a user can't trust at all.
I'm a contributor at OpenCores, a hardware equivalent of sourceforge.
Many moons ago, one of the list subscribers emailed the FSF (not sure who was the contact, but I think it was RMS). At the time the FSF didn't seem to be interested. RMS has also written
that the FSF is not interested in free hardware. His arguments seem to revolve around copyright not applying to physical objects and the fact that hardware cannot be copied like software.
RMS (and the FSF since he is speaking for them) seems to have misunderstood modern hardware design. Engineers no longer sit in labs surrounded by piles of circuit boards and logic chips.
Today's hardware is converging with software. Typically a generic Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is used as an implementation platform, with desktop manufacturing in the future. The definition of the system is written in a hardware description language (HDL), and is covered by copyright. Saying free hardware is not relevant is like saying free software is not relevant because the system on which it runs (a PC) cannot be copyrighted.
What will convince the FSF to change its position?
HDL by any other name is software. It is copyrightable, copiable and modifiable and deserves to have its freedom fully recognised.
HDL has the additional hurdle that it can describe patented objects. As such it is subject to threats by patent holders, even though one could argue that it is only the object, and not its description, which is patentable. Laws such as the CBDTPA will only increase the number of threats made against free hardware.
HDL descriptions already been removed from OpenCores due to theatened patent action. (See nnARM project.) This fledgling movement does not have the resources to even consider fighting such threats. It badly needs the protection of an organisation like the FSF.
Free hardware might not yet be on people's radar, but it will be once 'trusted' computing takes hold.
Given that your web domain is.au, I assume
you live in Australia? Does an application for a US
patent have any bearing on you at all? (Ignoring the fact that the way Johnnie is going we will be a US state by the time the patent is granted).
Related to this, Australia has recently introduced laws guaranteeing retailers the right to pass on credit card costs. Most retailers have been holding back on exercising this right, seeing what the competition does, but some big companies (such as QANTAS) are getting in on the act. eg. QANTAS has announced it will charge 1% extra when a credit card is used. One of the two dominant retail companies in Australia (Coles-Myer) is also said to be 'evaluating its options'.
Anyway, this sort of indicates that when the entire equation is looked at: cash handling costs vs. credit card costs, cash comes out cheaper for retailers (otherwise companies wouldn't be charging more for credit).
Does anyone see the irony of a movie studio using Linux while their parent company stomps on the DVD aspects of Linux?
At the same time, I cannot begrudge them this usage
as the principles of the GPL are far more important to me than playing DVDs. Hopefully this a small step in the movie industry embracing the ideals of sharing and cooperation in their entirety
Here is an example from January 1996, five months before the patent.
In January 1996, I set up a site to keep track of social events happening in Sydney Australia. The site consisted of a dynamic database of events, accessed by a perl CGI script. The front page to the site contained a number of static links pointing to dynamic pages, generated by the CGI script.
The dynamic content is missing from the archive (I still have the perl script and database on my local hard disk), but it is obvious from the form of the hypertext references that they point to dynamic pages, as they contain prefix expressions.
The Internet archive entry is dated January 17th 1999. The site was in existence well before this date. The archived page contains a message from me, dated 23rd May 1997, the date the site ceased operation. On 13th January 1997, I sent a message to aus.culture.ultimo in which I stated that the site had been running for twelve months. This message is archived at google:
So there it is. A dynamic/static web site whose history can be verified back to January 1996 by independent sources.
Despite the inconvenience, surely you have just demonstrated one of the advantages of Free Software? Your supplier of choice shafted you, so you shifted to another. A bump in the road, but not terminal to your customers or your business.
Imagine doing the same thing with proprietory software... First change operating systems. Second discover you have to change all applications, as the old ones are not available for the new operating system. Third, massive amounts of data have to be converted for each customer, as the new applications have different file formats and capabilities. And on it goes...
Ask yourself why Microsoft hasn't already
done this. They would have lots of fun
harassing the Linux community. Perhaps it's
because they can see that SCO don't have a
leg to stand on and it would be $16M wasted.
I would like the debugger to be able to tell me the way in which variables depend on each other, ideally with a quantitative measure of sensitivity.
For example, if a variable has a wrong value, being able to click on it and the debugger tells me all the variable on which the incorrect value depends. I can then trace back and inspect the values of the contributing variables. Once all the contributing variables have the right values, I know a problem is 'downstream' of that point.
It would also be nice to be able to go the other way. Click on a variable and the debugger tells you which variables depend on that variable.
Surely the fastest way to get the key is to grind/etch the top off the chips in an Xbox and use a scanning tunneling electron microscope (homebuilt of course) to read the binary code directly out of the transistors? All perfectly legal. (Well at least I'm assuming it is, since there are companies which specialise in doing this. Wonder if they charge less than US$100k?)
This assumes that the code is all locked up in a single chip. If not, why not just pull an Xbox to bits, read the binaries out of the ROMs and decompile?
Having an education usually means you have invested many years in a predetermined career path. In this situation, you have too much to lose (credibility, employability, 'well' paid job,...) by risking all.
If you don't have an education, you are more likely to risk all on the theory you started with nothing, so you might as well end with nothing. Under these conditions, one will be more willing to follow an offbeat path, gatecrash meetings, make loud noises and generally do things an 'educated' person one would not do.
I'm not doubting the authenticity of the story, but it must have taken some detective work to get that machine going. When I was at the University of Sydney, there used to be a bit of CSIRAC on display in the foyer of the Computer Science building.
What, and lose Free Software's main advantage?
on
Software For Ransom
·
· Score: 1
Surely this will kill collaborative development? Without collaborative development, free software will die.
Is there any possibility that the tag may be activated by stray environmental fields? This would reduce the distance requirement, for receiving, to a square law. The remote monitor would not be able to activate a tag on demand, but could make use of incidental activations.
Also, if the reader is small enough, what is stopping them from being embedded in doorways, lamp posts and so on? A shadower could use a handheld reader to follow a person (target) though a crowded space with little risk of losing them. Just use the reader to remotely detect an RFID chip on an article the person is carrying, then follow the chip.
It seems like a great technology for an assassin to track a target. Eg. Sadam uses the technology to track members of the Iraqi opposition through the streets of London.
Reading the Auto-ID Centre website, they show a soda can with an RF tag attached. It seems the ultimate plan is to track individual items. Presumably everyday items such a clothes will be carrying RFID tags, which will be so small the consumer may not be aware of their presence? Does this leave the possibility open for tracking individuals without their knowledge? Surely a large antenna array, with high performance receivers, could track an RFID tag from much further away that its designed distance? Perhaps as far away as low earth orbit?
> The only question I ask myself, is whether there are any solutions for solar powered transmission towers?
Australia's main telecommunications carrier, Telstra, makes extensive use of solar powered microwave and optical fibre repeaters in 'the outback' (rural areas).
A few posters have relied on Shannon's Law to say that the 19.2Mbit/s is on the receive side only, or huge transmiter powers are required. THIS IS NOT THE CASE. Lucent is transmitting 19.2Mbit/s in a 1MHz bandwidth point to point.
BLAST has only been possible since a fundamental breakthrough by in 1996 by Foschini and friends. Foschini's work showed that the Shannon Law you learnt at Uni was not the full story. In fact, Shannon's Law can be written as a matrix equation and in the presence of multipath interference one effectively has a full capacity channel between each pair of antennae. 'N' Antennas at each end means 'N' times the capacity in the same bandwidth. Read Foschini's paper for a proper, quite readable, explanation:
G. J. Foschini, Layered Space-Time Architecture for Wireless Communication in a Fading Environment When Using Multiple Antennas , Bell Labs Technical Journal, Vol. 1, No. 2, Autumn 1996, pp 41-59.
Looking at the list of most read articles on the front page of the SMH (bottom right), it's interesting to note that the most viewed article in today's edition of the SMH is:
"Man dies after playing computer games non-stop"
Guess more people must read Slashdot than the SMH.
Slashdot Mirror
Mixing is a property of distortion in the receiving and transmitting equipment, not the basic physics of propagation. Reed would argue the solution is to build better, more linear, equipment. Yes, in practise there is a limit as to how good a piece of equipment we can build, but the limit is getting better all the time, so it is not a fundamental limitation.
An ASIS is the Australian equivalent od the NSA.
The file of this patent contains at least one drawing executed in color. ...
Does this mean you can scan the image from the patent and use it as an icon?
I can hear the defence in court now..."No your honour I didn't copy their icon, I copied their patent".
I have heard of a student in a first year uni course walking into the lab, pulling a 5 1/4" floppy disk from his packet UNFOLDING it and putting it in a drive. Needless to say, the rest of the room was howling with laughter. The laughter was short lived when the floppy disk worked!
> The most important threat to the survival of free software is the concept of "trusted computing," which really means the building of hardware you as a user can't trust at all.
I'm a contributor at OpenCores, a hardware equivalent of sourceforge.
Many moons ago, one of the list subscribers emailed the FSF (not sure who was the contact, but I think it was RMS). At the time the FSF didn't seem to be interested. RMS has also written that the FSF is not interested in free hardware. His arguments seem to revolve around copyright not applying to physical objects and the fact that hardware cannot be copied like software.
RMS (and the FSF since he is speaking for them) seems to have misunderstood modern hardware design. Engineers no longer sit in labs surrounded by piles of circuit boards and logic chips.
Today's hardware is converging with software. Typically a generic Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is used as an implementation platform, with desktop manufacturing in the future. The definition of the system is written in a hardware description language (HDL), and is covered by copyright. Saying free hardware is not relevant is like saying free software is not relevant because the system on which it runs (a PC) cannot be copyrighted.
What will convince the FSF to change its position?
HDL by any other name is software. It is copyrightable, copiable and modifiable and deserves to have its freedom fully recognised.
HDL has the additional hurdle that it can describe patented objects. As such it is subject to threats by patent holders, even though one could argue that it is only the object, and not its description, which is patentable. Laws such as the CBDTPA will only increase the number of threats made against free hardware.
HDL descriptions already been removed from OpenCores due to theatened patent action. (See nnARM project.) This fledgling movement does not have the resources to even consider fighting such threats. It badly needs the protection of an organisation like the FSF.
Free hardware might not yet be on people's radar, but it will be once 'trusted' computing takes hold.
Given that your web domain is .au, I assume
you live in Australia? Does an application for a US
patent have any bearing on you at all? (Ignoring the fact that the way Johnnie is going we will be a US state by the time the patent is granted).
Then it looks like I will have to live without hope! :-)
Anyway, this sort of indicates that when the entire equation is looked at: cash handling costs vs. credit card costs, cash comes out cheaper for retailers (otherwise companies wouldn't be charging more for credit).
At the same time, I cannot begrudge them this usage as the principles of the GPL are far more important to me than playing DVDs. Hopefully this a small step in the movie industry embracing the ideals of sharing and cooperation in their entirety
In January 1996, I set up a site to keep track of social events happening in Sydney Australia. The site consisted of a dynamic database of events, accessed by a perl CGI script. The front page to the site contained a number of static links pointing to dynamic pages, generated by the CGI script.
The static parts of the site are in the Internet Archive.
The dynamic content is missing from the archive (I still have the perl script and database on my local hard disk), but it is obvious from the form of the hypertext references that they point to dynamic pages, as they contain prefix expressions.
The Internet archive entry is dated January 17th 1999. The site was in existence well before this date. The archived page contains a message from me, dated 23rd May 1997, the date the site ceased operation. On 13th January 1997, I sent a message to aus.culture.ultimo in which I stated that the site had been running for twelve months. This message is archived at google:
So there it is. A dynamic/static web site whose history can be verified back to January 1996 by independent sources.
Imagine doing the same thing with proprietory software... First change operating systems. Second discover you have to change all applications, as the old ones are not available for the new operating system. Third, massive amounts of data have to be converted for each customer, as the new applications have different file formats and capabilities. And on it goes...
Ask yourself why Microsoft hasn't already done this. They would have lots of fun harassing the Linux community. Perhaps it's because they can see that SCO don't have a leg to stand on and it would be $16M wasted.
What have the Aboriginals (first Australians) done to deserve crap like this?
Based on some of his tech policy, the Australian PM hasn't yet figured out that the Internet exists, yet alone got an email address.
But the Finns don't get summer!
For example, if a variable has a wrong value, being able to click on it and the debugger tells me all the variable on which the incorrect value depends. I can then trace back and inspect the values of the contributing variables. Once all the contributing variables have the right values, I know a problem is 'downstream' of that point.
It would also be nice to be able to go the other way. Click on a variable and the debugger tells you which variables depend on that variable.
This assumes that the code is all locked up in a single chip. If not, why not just pull an Xbox to bits, read the binaries out of the ROMs and decompile?
If you don't have an education, you are more likely to risk all on the theory you started with nothing, so you might as well end with nothing. Under these conditions, one will be more willing to follow an offbeat path, gatecrash meetings, make loud noises and generally do things an 'educated' person one would not do.
I'm not doubting the authenticity of the story, but it must have taken some detective work to get that machine going. When I was at the University of Sydney, there used to be a bit of CSIRAC on display in the foyer of the Computer Science building.
Surely this will kill collaborative development? Without collaborative development, free software will die.
Also, if the reader is small enough, what is stopping them from being embedded in doorways, lamp posts and so on? A shadower could use a handheld reader to follow a person (target) though a crowded space with little risk of losing them. Just use the reader to remotely detect an RFID chip on an article the person is carrying, then follow the chip.
It seems like a great technology for an assassin to track a target. Eg. Sadam uses the technology to track members of the Iraqi opposition through the streets of London.
Reading the Auto-ID Centre website, they show a soda can with an RF tag attached. It seems the ultimate plan is to track individual items. Presumably everyday items such a clothes will be carrying RFID tags, which will be so small the consumer may not be aware of their presence? Does this leave the possibility open for tracking individuals without their knowledge? Surely a large antenna array, with high performance receivers, could track an RFID tag from much further away that its designed distance? Perhaps as far away as low earth orbit?
Australia's main telecommunications carrier, Telstra, makes extensive use of solar powered microwave and optical fibre repeaters in 'the outback' (rural areas).
BLAST has only been possible since a fundamental breakthrough by in 1996 by Foschini and friends. Foschini's work showed that the Shannon Law you learnt at Uni was not the full story. In fact, Shannon's Law can be written as a matrix equation and in the presence of multipath interference one effectively has a full capacity channel between each pair of antennae. 'N' Antennas at each end means 'N' times the capacity in the same bandwidth. Read Foschini's paper for a proper, quite readable, explanation:
G. J. Foschini, Layered Space-Time Architecture for Wireless Communication in a Fading Environment When Using Multiple Antennas , Bell Labs Technical Journal, Vol. 1, No. 2, Autumn 1996, pp 41-59.
Bell Lab's BLAST site also has more detail.
"Man dies after playing computer games non-stop"
Guess more people must read Slashdot than the SMH.