Why is the US military pressing on with this Missile Defence crap anyway (given that it doesnt look like it will actually work)
Oh wait, this is the US military we are talking about, spending money on things that dont actually achieve the desired outcome (generally at the behest of political leaders) is par for the course.
Maybe if Bush would do what more and more americans seem to want and just pull out of Iraq (and sooner rather than later) and let the Iraqi people sort things out, money wouldnt have to be taken away from other more important programs.
Question is, do the Iraqi people (and more specifically the new Iraqi president and government) want the US and others to stay in Iraq? If not, we DEFINATLY shouldnt be in there (last I checked, having military forces in a country when the government of that country does not want those forces there is a violation of a whole bunch of international treaties and rules and stuff...)
I think what Sony should do is to take the final shipping hardware, build a final-shipping-hardware devkit, find some programmers and artists and experts and have them push the PS3 hardware to the limits. Really show off what it can do graphically. Then, show this tech demo running off REAL hardware in as many places as they can. Market the hell out of it and show it off everywhere.
You dont need a final ship date or working blue-ray AACS content protection to ramp up the marketing machine NOW before microsoft has a chance to get into high gear (especially in japan)
Would having information and source from microsoft (and being allowed to use it) help with making linux NTFS support better? Or do "we" (as in the open source community) know enough about NTFS and its just a matter of actually writing the code for it?
The problems with hubble are mostly political. Regardless of the actual chance of something going wrong, all that congress cares about is that if they send a shuttle to Hubble and something breaks, there is not a whole lot they can do which means that they could loose both a fully functioning shuttle (Discovery is the only one that can get to Hubble AFAIK) and crew. If you send a shuttle up to ISS and something goes wrong, the crew can stay in ISS and use ISS as a base to make repairs (if necessary I am sure they could send up "spare parts" or alternativly send up a rescue craft or lifeboat or something)
Personally, I think the best answer is to decomission Hubble and build a new telescope using the spare parts planned for the fix (IIRC they have a spare primary mirror for example) and launch that somehow.
Copy protection is (increasingly) designed to stop the casual copiers. For example, the people who borrow a CD off a mate and rip it to their MP3 player instead of buying the CD. Or the people who record episodes of TV shows with a DVD recorder instead of buying the DVD box set. Or the people who buy a new computer with a new version of windows or office or some other software package and decide to install it on all their other computers as well.
All this Rights Management stuff is good but what about all the stuff you CANT protect that way.
Let me know when someone has come up with a way to protect C/C++ code (reference the windows source leak, the HL2 source leak etc) with this kind of technology...
What I think the OP is refering to (and I aggree with this too) is that you should be recquired to demonstrate that you actually have done some work on making the idea you want to patent into an actual product.
For this, submitting blueprints or simulations would probobly suffice too (e.g. in the case of an integrated circut, showing the patent office a simulation of a chip containing patentable idea would probobly work since it demonstrates that work has been done towards turning the idea into an actual physical item)
Another example, if you have built a new kind of gismo for a jet engine that and want a patent, you could either demonstrate the gismo on a working jet engine or submit complete blueprints for how to build a jet engine with this gismo on it (or how to retrofit it onto an existing engine). Or even just complete blueprints for the gismo itself.
I cant think of anything that deserves a patent where the person comming up with the patent would be unable to show a prototype, simulation or plan for a device incorporating what is described in the patent.
The problem is not so much students accessing inappropriate sites, its what happens when the parents find out (threatening law suits or removal of their kid from the school for example)
At the labs they had at uni, they used padlocks to lock the PC to the desk and also padlocks that had all the cables running through them so that it was impossible to remove the mouse, keyboard etc without cutting the cable.
Whats cool about all this is not that its new (fights like this were first carried out by the North American Aviation X-15 rocket plane launched from a B-52 Bomber) but that its been done by a private company in a way thats easily reproducable and promises to get cheaper over time.
When They (as in the government and the cops who operate the cameras) redefine "doing something wrong" and use the cameras to bust you. Or when the people monitoring the cameras mis-interperate what they see.
Also, who will pay for these cameras? Will the taxpayers pay more tax? If not, where will the money come from?
And, finally, which camera manufacturer left the big black suitcase full of unmarked bills in the police chiefs car in return for suggesting this?
Not knowing anything about Houston or Texas politics, I have no idea if this guy is just spouting his mouth off or if there is an actual chance that this will be implemented, any Texans want to enlighten me?
What will happen is that microsoft will either not sign the drivers for the card or (more likely) sign the drivers but only once they correctly report "no HDCP on this card" What will happen is that Vista (along with the HD-DVD or Blu-Ray drive and player) will see that the video card has no HDCP and refuse to play the content.
Whether global warming exists and if so, what causes it is immaterial. What matters is that polution caused by factories, power plants, cars, trucks, airplanes etc is bad for the planet and reducing it would be a Good Thing (that at least science generally aggrees on)
What I would like for GIMP is not MDI (in the way it used to be or the way Paint Shop Pro etc do it) but a way or an option to have the toolbars and menus attach to the side/top/whatever of the GIMP window like you get in Firefox, OpenOffice and so on. So, each window contains its own copy of the toolbar.
My favorite file manager (and one that I used to use ALL the time) is X-Tree Gold. I still use a clone (Z-Tree) for a bunch of things (e.g. if I want to search through a bunch of binary files for a text or hex string or if I want to look at a bunch of binary files in a viewer)
All you need is for the voting machine to count the vote electronicly and ALSO print out a ballot with both a machine readable barcode and a human readable vote on it. Ballot goes into a sealed ballot box. If there is a dispute about the machine readable vote (which has the advantage of being available soon after the election closes), you can scan the barcodes or manually count the votes.
Its not hard to build, it would be dead simple given a computer to run it on (either a PC or something embedded, whatever is cheaper), a cheap LCD touch screen and a simple reciept printer (same as you see in a cash register). Then, given an OS to run on the machine and hardware drivers for the screen and printer, all you need is some simple software to do the actual voting.
Then all you have to do is to put an end to groups whos sole reason for existance is to get people to vote one way or the other because of and there might be a chance of people being elected because they are the right people for the job people who can fix the problems with the economy and people who are prepared to stop throwing money away fighting wars that shouldnt have been fought in the first place for example)
Just to follow that, I have a Motorola E378i mobile phone and I was able to load MP3 files from my own collection and not have to pay big $$$ for them (the fact that the tones I have probobly arent even AVAILABLE as ringtones nonwithstanding)
Sequals are popular with the industry because it is often significantly cheaper to produce a sequal than it is to produce a new game (especially true of sports games)
The problem with S/MIME is that you need to buy a certificate which costs $$$. PGP (or GPG) is a better option, you dont need to buy anything I want to see PGP/GPG support in email programs. Or, at least, something that can layer on top of all major email programs and can handle PGP/GPG.
I remember seeing something somewhere which encrypted your hard disk with multiple levels such that you could legitimatly claim that you are only using "level 1" and it would be impossible to detect any other levels beyond that (since the number of levels was fixed and there is no way to tell if a level is in use or not) Unless they can prove somehow that there is data you havent revealed (or levels you havent revealed), it would be almost impossible to get at any levels/data you didnt want to reveal.
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Why is the US military pressing on with this Missile Defence crap anyway (given that it doesnt look like it will actually work)
Oh wait, this is the US military we are talking about, spending money on things that dont actually achieve the desired outcome (generally at the behest of political leaders) is par for the course.
Maybe if Bush would do what more and more americans seem to want and just pull out of Iraq (and sooner rather than later) and let the Iraqi people sort things out, money wouldnt have to be taken away from other more important programs.
Question is, do the Iraqi people (and more specifically the new Iraqi president and government) want the US and others to stay in Iraq? If not, we DEFINATLY shouldnt be in there (last I checked, having military forces in a country when the government of that country does not want those forces there is a violation of a whole bunch of international treaties and rules and stuff...)
I think what Sony should do is to take the final shipping hardware, build a final-shipping-hardware devkit, find some programmers and artists and experts and have them push the PS3 hardware to the limits. Really show off what it can do graphically. Then, show this tech demo running off REAL hardware in as many places as they can. Market the hell out of it and show it off everywhere.
You dont need a final ship date or working blue-ray AACS content protection to ramp up the marketing machine NOW before microsoft has a chance to get into high gear (especially in japan)
Would having information and source from microsoft (and being allowed to use it) help with making linux NTFS support better?
Or do "we" (as in the open source community) know enough about NTFS and its just a matter of actually writing the code for it?
The crew vehicle sounds just like what the Boeing X-20 Dyna Soar would have been had it actually been built.
The problems with hubble are mostly political.
Regardless of the actual chance of something going wrong, all that congress cares about is that if they send a shuttle to Hubble and something breaks, there is not a whole lot they can do which means that they could loose both a fully functioning shuttle (Discovery is the only one that can get to Hubble AFAIK) and crew. If you send a shuttle up to ISS and something goes wrong, the crew can stay in ISS and use ISS as a base to make repairs (if necessary I am sure they could send up "spare parts" or alternativly send up a rescue craft or lifeboat or something)
Personally, I think the best answer is to decomission Hubble and build a new telescope using the spare parts planned for the fix (IIRC they have a spare primary mirror for example) and launch that somehow.
Copy protection is (increasingly) designed to stop the casual copiers.
For example, the people who borrow a CD off a mate and rip it to their MP3 player instead of buying the CD.
Or the people who record episodes of TV shows with a DVD recorder instead of buying the DVD box set.
Or the people who buy a new computer with a new version of windows or office or some other software package and decide to install it on all their other computers as well.
Devices that plug into a USB port and contain storage are potential vectors for stealing corporate data.
All this Rights Management stuff is good but what about all the stuff you CANT protect that way.
Let me know when someone has come up with a way to protect C/C++ code (reference the windows source leak, the HL2 source leak etc) with this kind of technology...
What I think the OP is refering to (and I aggree with this too) is that you should be recquired to demonstrate that you actually have done some work on making the idea you want to patent into an actual product.
For this, submitting blueprints or simulations would probobly suffice too (e.g. in the case of an integrated circut, showing the patent office a simulation of a chip containing patentable idea would probobly work since it demonstrates that work has been done towards turning the idea into an actual physical item)
Another example, if you have built a new kind of gismo for a jet engine that and want a patent, you could either demonstrate the gismo on a working jet engine or submit complete blueprints for how to build a jet engine with this gismo on it (or how to retrofit it onto an existing engine). Or even just complete blueprints for the gismo itself.
I cant think of anything that deserves a patent where the person comming up with the patent would be unable to show a prototype, simulation or plan for a device incorporating what is described in the patent.
Wouldnt it be a violation of the Temporal Prime Directive to try and patent something before it is actually invented?
The problem is not so much students accessing inappropriate sites, its what happens when the parents find out (threatening law suits or removal of their kid from the school for example)
Any school where students have even read access to the places where teachers keep their grades needs to fire the sysadmin.
At the labs they had at uni, they used padlocks to lock the PC to the desk and also padlocks that had all the cables running through them so that it was impossible to remove the mouse, keyboard etc without cutting the cable.
Whats cool about all this is not that its new (fights like this were first carried out by the North American Aviation X-15 rocket plane launched from a B-52 Bomber) but that its been done by a private company in a way thats easily reproducable and promises to get cheaper over time.
When They (as in the government and the cops who operate the cameras) redefine "doing something wrong" and use the cameras to bust you. Or when the people monitoring the cameras mis-interperate what they see.
Also, who will pay for these cameras? Will the taxpayers pay more tax? If not, where will the money come from?
And, finally, which camera manufacturer left the big black suitcase full of unmarked bills in the police chiefs car in return for suggesting this?
Not knowing anything about Houston or Texas politics, I have no idea if this guy is just spouting his mouth off or if there is an actual chance that this will be implemented, any Texans want to enlighten me?
What will happen is that microsoft will either not sign the drivers for the card or (more likely) sign the drivers but only once they correctly report "no HDCP on this card"
What will happen is that Vista (along with the HD-DVD or Blu-Ray drive and player) will see that the video card has no HDCP and refuse to play the content.
Whether global warming exists and if so, what causes it is immaterial.
What matters is that polution caused by factories, power plants, cars, trucks, airplanes etc is bad for the planet and reducing it would be a Good Thing (that at least science generally aggrees on)
What I would like for GIMP is not MDI (in the way it used to be or the way Paint Shop Pro etc do it) but a way or an option to have the toolbars and menus attach to the side/top/whatever of the GIMP window like you get in Firefox, OpenOffice and so on.
So, each window contains its own copy of the toolbar.
My favorite file manager (and one that I used to use ALL the time) is X-Tree Gold. I still use a clone (Z-Tree) for a bunch of things (e.g. if I want to search through a bunch of binary files for a text or hex string or if I want to look at a bunch of binary files in a viewer)
All you need is for the voting machine to count the vote electronicly and ALSO print out a ballot with both a machine readable barcode and a human readable vote on it. Ballot goes into a sealed ballot box.
If there is a dispute about the machine readable vote (which has the advantage of being available soon after the election closes), you can scan the barcodes or manually count the votes.
Its not hard to build, it would be dead simple given a computer to run it on (either a PC or something embedded, whatever is cheaper), a cheap LCD touch screen and a simple reciept printer (same as you see in a cash register). Then, given an OS to run on the machine and hardware drivers for the screen and printer, all you need is some simple software to do the actual voting.
Then all you have to do is to put an end to groups whos sole reason for existance is to get people to vote one way or the other because of and there might be a chance of people being elected because they are the right people for the job people who can fix the problems with the economy and people who are prepared to stop throwing money away fighting wars that shouldnt have been fought in the first place for example)
Just to follow that, I have a Motorola E378i mobile phone and I was able to load MP3 files from my own collection and not have to pay big $$$ for them (the fact that the tones I have probobly arent even AVAILABLE as ringtones nonwithstanding)
Sequals are popular with the industry because it is often significantly cheaper to produce a sequal than it is to produce a new game (especially true of sports games)
The problem with S/MIME is that you need to buy a certificate which costs $$$.
PGP (or GPG) is a better option, you dont need to buy anything
I want to see PGP/GPG support in email programs.
Or, at least, something that can layer on top of all major email programs and can handle PGP/GPG.
I remember seeing something somewhere which encrypted your hard disk with multiple levels such that you could legitimatly claim that you are only using "level 1" and it would be impossible to detect any other levels beyond that (since the number of levels was fixed and there is no way to tell if a level is in use or not)
Unless they can prove somehow that there is data you havent revealed (or levels you havent revealed), it would be almost impossible to get at any levels/data you didnt want to reveal.