I think you woefully overestimate the intelligence and market sway of the average consumer.
What the whole ICT issue is going to do is create an extra upgrade cycle: everybody will get on the HD bandwagon now, and in a few years they'll roll out HDCP, and in order to watch new content, people will get new televisions.
This works well for the electronics manufacturers, because they get another shot at replacing a good chunk of the public's equipment in a few years, and although it slows the studios getting total content control by a few years, they'll still get what they want in the end.
Particularly because I don't expect the MPAA et al. to be idle in the meantime before the ICT rollout. On the contrary: I suspect they'll be watching the non-HDCP HD rollout very closely, and tallying up ridiculous numbers of dollars lost to "piracy" and "home copying", so that when HDCP comes, it won't just come from the studios, it'll have the full weight of Congress behind it.
True, but every car on the road today in the U.S. (or at least the great, great majority of them) have a fairly substantial mass of palladium already: in the catalytic converter. I'm not sure exactly how much palladium a car would need in order to hold a full charge of hydrogen, but I think if you started recycling the stuff that's in catalytic converters, you'd have a good start towards the amount you'd need to start using it as a hydrogen carrier, at least to start out.
Also, from an environmental standpoint, the fact that it's valuable and rare is probably better than if it were currently cheap, since it keeps it from be being implemented as a throwaway, and creating shortages and problems later on. At least this way, we'll implement the full reclamation cycle from the beginning.
That's not plagiarism, that's copyright infringement.
People seem to confuse these two concepts a lot. They occur together quite often, so I suppose it's understandable, but that doesn't make it correct.
Plagiarism is taking someone else's work for your own. Oftentimes this can be done without actually violating their copyright. For example, see the case of the recent Harvard student who got her book pulled because of passages that were very close to another book's. The passages aren't identical, and there's probably no grounds for a copyright violation suit, but that didn't help the author from getting her book deal pulled. If I copy something you wrote wholesale and say I wrote it, then it would be both a copyright violation and plagiarism, but I could rewrite it such that it's not a copyright violation, "forget" to attribute the source, and still be in trouble in terms of professional ethics.
I could violate your copyright without plagiarizing anything, as well. I could for example copy and redistribute something you wrote, with correct attributions, but without your permission. (One could argue that this is also unethical, but that's a separate can of worms.) Then you'd probably be able to go after me under the copyright laws.
This latter case is what happens in many blogs, and just generally on the internet, all the time. I think most of the time it's well-intentioned: a blogger wants to use some material, but knows that links are unstable, so just reposts it with attribution instead, thinking that this makes it OK. It's not, unless the original author has given permission. A certain amount of excerpting is allowed by fair-use rules, but this generally doesn't make a complete copy-and-paste repost of somebody else's article defensible.
In general, when people talk about plagiarism, they are talking about an issue of professional and personal ethics, particularly within academia, and which is independent of issues of copyright. Likewise, copyright violations are a legal issue, and can occur independently of ethical issues (assuming you don't blanket-assume that all violations of the law are inherently unethical). There are obviously grey areas and large exceptions to this generalization, but I think that's a fair starting point.
Just as an addition, the "Off-the-Record (OTR) Messaging" plugin for Gaim offers a similar setup for instant messaging. (You can use it with other IM clients as well; it works with stock AIM as an HTTP proxy and is built in to Adium for Mac.)
In my opinion, it's a much better system than some of the other IM encryption setups, which give you authentication but not any forward secrecy or deniability. Basically it forces you to authenticate the other party via a side-channel, rather than using a trust framework a la PGP, but in return the authentication can't be turned around and used against you after the fact.
It does this via an unauthenticated Diffie-Hellman key exchange, and then creating and exchanging a per-session symmetric key within that channel, which is destroyed at the end of the conversation. More technical information is available here.
In short it provides more authentication than Trillian's setup, more deniability than gaim-encryption, and doesn't require any of the infrastructure required by SILC. The only difficulty in using it is getting other people to use a supported client program and to install the plugin / generate a key.
I think there's room for both types of encrypted communications: ones that provide a trust framework and robust authentication, and ones that provide for more deniability (and allow the computerized century equivalents of a face-to-face meeting, where if both people desire it, they can deny the contents of the communication later).
any comercial grade encryprtion/decryption program has to have a key short enough to enable real time encryption/decryption using normal computer chips... any key short enough for fast encryption/decryption of things like telephone conversations has to be easily brute forceable.
While I am not any way in favor of government restrictions on encryption, I think this statement is patently false.
A common PC can do real-time encryption/decryption of a telephone-quality digital audio stream with significant key lengths, which are not "easily brute forceable." Or at least, the difficulty of brute forcing them is probably greater than using a side-channel attack.
Symmetric key ciphers (which are what you'd use to actually encrypt the content of a telephone conversation) are quite fast, and a compressed audio stream really isn't that much data. Your statement might be true if the encryption devices were small embedded systems, but even then I'm not sure.
Barring some as-yet-undisclosed jump in computing technology that the government has access to, and normal people do not (which isn't out of the realm of possibility -- for all we know, the NSA might be sitting on a quantum computer, although I rather doubt it), current technologies allow a person to encrypt their data in ways that are fairly difficult to open by brute force, even for an attacker with substantially greater resources than the encryptor.
I was skimming around trying to find more information on the whole MAE East and West facilities. There's not a whole lot out there; they seem to not like to disclose a whole lot about them.
Anyway, I did find this page on Cryptome, which provides some interesting maps and aerial photographs of the various sites.
What interested me most was the area adjacent to the MAE East facility marked "CIA SAIC ET AL". Interesting; not particularly suspicious, given that the CIA HQ isn't far from there, but still interesting placement.
At any rate, regardless of what you think of that unexplained mark on the photo, it's worth looking at the photos. I wonder what (if any) signs they have on the doors. I rather suspect that somewhere in that building is another "secret room" as well.
Agreed. We used to have a water filter/cooler, but it disappeared a few months ago, the excuse being that it had been a "temporary" measure while the drinking fountains were out of commission (3+ years).
I tried to drink the fountain water, but it tastes like it comes out of the shallow end of a YMCA pool.
So now I'm back to bottled water and diet soda; I generally shop around and get water in cases (I try not to pay more than 25 cents per bottle) and diet soda in 12 packs. I've never found the taste of diet soda objectionable, but then again I've basically never known much else. Some of my family members are diabetic so it's always been artificially sweetened sodas as long as I can remember (Fresca and Tab were our mainstays). When I drink a regular Coke, it's like drinking candy. I can't get used to the weird furry feeling it leaves on my teeth.
I mostly go for Diet Coke and Pepsi, because I want the caffeine, and it's easier to open a can of soda than it is to brew a pot of coffee. I've started to think about getting a single-serving machine for the office, but I have a feeling that my co-workers (and my boss) wouldn't appreciate me getting any more strung out on stimulants than I already get from canned beverages.
While CAFC has resulted in some quite bad decisions, it has at least brought some consistency.
I don't know about you, but I'll take a court that returns a wrong/Bad decision 50% of the time, instead of a court that returns a Bad decision 90% of the time, even if the latter is more "consistent."
Consistency isn't necessarily a good thing, if it's in the wrong direction.
Inconsistently good is better than consistently bad any day.
In TFA, one of the patients with the skin condition committed suicide after not receiving any help from the medical establishment, because living with the condition was that bad.
I interpreted the GP's post as agreeing with that sentiment, although I suppose it could also be interpreted as turning the gun on the dermatologist instead.
Either way represents what I believe in the medical community is termed an "adverse outcome."
Interesting -- I had no idea that any wireless-card vendor had actually written Linux drivers and GPLed them. At least recently.
I'm definitely going to be bumping Ralink to the top of my list next time I'm interested in getting hardware, just for that. I sprung for a crappy Best Buy PCI wireless card a few months ago, and ndiswrappers has caused me nothing but pain. Plus, the attitude of the vendors (Netgear and Linksys are both bad) where they use undocumented chipsets, and then change the chipsets seemingly at random, with only subtle clues to mark the difference, just make me feel dirty for giving them my money.
It's nice to know there's a company out there I can buy something from without feeling like I'm supporting the business practices I hate most.
Pity Debian doesn't give Ralink the treatment they deserve; you're right, Ralink should get some applause (although not too much -- let's not forget they did what we'd like to see everyone doing, not something that should be exceptional). I guess nobody has ever accused Debian of moving too quickly, though. Seven months for Debian is barely enough time to start mulling the issue over.
What I was trying to describe (and perhaps failing) was skipping the bytecode step and the whole JIT compilation business.
Go from the Java source to machine-specific binaries, in one step, and distribute the binaries. Just like you'd do with a program written in C and compiled with GCC (or any other language that doesn't use an intermediate language). Nothing in between: Java to binary.
Basically, my question was 'can we separate the strengths and weaknesses of Java as a language from the way it's generally used, with all the bytecode and JIT stuff?'
Was it playing at its full framerate though? If you press Command-I while the video is playing, it'll bring up an informational window that will show the file's framerate, and the rate that it's actually playing at. Quicktime will drop the framerate before it actually starts to studder, so something can look fairly smooth (if you're not looking closely) but on closer inspection might only be playing at 15 or 20 fps.
Not saying that's what's happening, but "it looks good" can be misleading if you're trying to get a benchmark.
That was back before they either got too big to put on your lap, or hot enough to render you sterile.
Now I don't think any company in their right mind would market a "laptop," probably for liability reasons. Heck, my corporate ThinkPad came with a warning sticker that said it was only to be run on hard surfaces. (I will leave the requisite joke about laps and "hard" surfaces to the reader.)
Okay, I may be exposing my ignorance here, not having much experience with Java, but I just have to wonder -- is there something fundamental about the Java language that lends itself to or requires the whole JIT-bytecode thing?
I mean, if it's a Turing-complete language, can't it be compiled into any machine code you want, with the right compiler? Is there some reason why one has never been built?
Why is it that people always tie Java to these JIT compilers? If Java is so slow, can't a direct machine-code/binary compiler be made for it, just like GCC? Sure, it would give away the platform-independence advantage, but it would allow people to optimize sections of Java code for particular architectures without rewriting them in C.
Maybe I'm missing something, because it seems too obvious to not have been created already. But why would Java be inherently any more slow than any other language, if it were directly compiled on an optimized x86 compiler?
Wait and buy them when they're smuggled back into this country after being sold by the people they're given to.
I'll give it maybe three months before they're all over eBay.
And that's even if they're painted some sort of really obnoxious color to distinguish them from legitimately-imported/"non-OLPC" ones. I bet in certain circles, having a 'hot laptop' will be fashionable. (After all, sagging pants originated from prisons, where high-risk inmates aren't given belts. Don't put anything by popular culture.)
They'll never make the computer illegal, they're far too useful as tools for oppression and control. How else do you data-mine the peons' phone calls?
Much like guns, nobody really wants to get rid of all of them, they just want to get rid of yours.
Eventually I suspect that they'll just require you to have a "computer permit," showing that you're not a hacker, terrorist, or pedophile. From there it's trivially easy to ratchet up the qualifications for obtaining a permit (since the permits won't do anything to stop crime, whether cyber- or regular): until you have to pass three background checks, a credit check, give a sample of your DNA, and show your Party membership card to get on the 'net. And a stiff tax, of course: naturally the government will get its pound of flesh for the Treasury. That helps to keep the riffraff out too.
Everyone without a permit will still have some, limited, probably one-way access (the TV networks wouldn't allow it otherwise), but it's just far too dangerous to let them send things. Computers are just far too complicated for the average person; they let you do anything!
That's very true. I would hope that's the case, although I doubt under our current system that it is.
It would seem fair that if you call BS on somebody's patent, and it turns out you're right (and the patent was crap), they ought to foot the bill for the re-examination.
I think you underestimate the use of attachments in a corporate setting, and the amount of user resistance to such a scheme that would require uploading in addition to sending a link. In fact, such a scheme would probably just result in a proliferation of "one button upload" tools that would upload a file to a server and link it in the outgoing document simultaneously, which could then be used by virus writers to spread their payloads. In short, you'd have maybe given then a 6 month hiccup while the tools got written and while they learned to exploit them.
Actually, I could think of a lot of nasty ways you could use such a system to an even greater virus-spreading effect than attachments, since once you got the payload on the server you would only have to spread the link to that one file, and you're spreading the virus. So rather than having to make every user send out a 500kb "word document" to everyone in their address book, they just email everyone in the corporation a link to the file.
And of course, you'd still need to make these "attachment servers" globally accessible at some level, because otherwise there'd be no way for people outside the organization to send attachments in. Blocking all incoming attachments, while it might seem like a good idea to IT people, wouldn't go over well with most employees; there are valid business reasons for wanting to receive attachments from other people (e.g., if a client sends you a PDF, you better damn well not have to tell them "oh, I don't do attachments"). Ever heard of e-faxes? Scan to email?
The only people this would benefit are the software companies that would make the tools to run the servers that would host these "detached attachments" and sell the new versions of the email software that everyone would have to upgrade to, in order to use them.
The only "solutions" to these problems are using operating systems that are more secure, coupled with educating users on good security practices. But given that there's a general lack of common sense in the population in all things, not just limited to computers, I think the latter is probably a long shot. A trite solution like moving attachments to a server wouldn't help much.
What's funnier is Apple used to allow that (computer to computer, not computer to portable device, though) but had to pull the feature because of the problems it raised regarding piracy; it was about the same time they started into negotiations with the record labels over iTMS, I think.
You could boot up iTunes on any computer, hit Connect (from the Advanced menu, I believe) type in your home computer's address, and instantly you'd have access to your music library remotely. It was quite brilliant at the time, I used to use it to listen to music on my PowerBook without taking up its hard drive.
I suspect any other 'worldwide streaming' feature that didn't come with gobs and gobs of mandatory DRM would probably meet a similar fate.
I'd much rather see my tax dollars ending up in a company inside the US than being funneled to a foreign economy somewhere.
That said, I'm not sure how you can really avoid this anymore. If you can buy a computer which is both assembled and has a majority of its parts made in this country, I'd really like to know where to get one (and how many thousands of dollars it costs). Except for food, pretty much anything that gets bought, either by a private citizen or the government, is going to increase our current-account deficit.
I admit to not being an economist, so when I get told by people knowledgeable in these things that "free trade helps our economy more than it hurts it," I have to basically shrug and agree. Maybe it's more advantageous to have completely free trade than to engage in protectionism. It sure doesn't seem like this intuitively; in fact it really seems like we're dying the death of a thousand cuts as we slowly outsource everything, and are on a path that seems suspiciously unsustainable. If this is not the case, if a complete "service economy," where everybody is getting paid for doing something and then turning around and spending their paycheck to buy imported goods, is infinitely sustainable, than that argument sure isn't being sold to the American public very well, because there are a lot of people more unhappy than I with the current direction. (And I'm not talking about politics / disliking the President here, we're talking about things bigger than any one administration.)
But at the very least, I think the government has a responsibility not to take money out of my paycheck and spend it on foreign goods and foreign corporations, as long as there are domestic producers offering the same or equivalent services, at any price. Or perhaps, unless the foreign corporation is willing to sell it at a price lower than the U.S. corporations price, after the taxes that the U.S. corporation returns, and its U.S. employees return, and its other contributions to the economy return. Or perhaps we could invite foreign corporations who want to be on equal footing with U.S. contractors to start paying taxes here, equivalent to what they'd pay as a domestic organization.
On a slight tangent: I feel the same way with the Iraq reconstruction efforts. I found it slightly comical when the European governments were protesting about the number of U.S. reconstruction contracts going to U.S. companies. Can you say, "no shit, Sherlock?" Unless they're needed for some particular skill that simply isn't obtainable from a U.S. contractor, there better not be any European companies on the taxpayer payroll over there. Opinions on the war, WMDs, and "Iraqi Freedom" aside, I think we can all agree that it was never sold to the public as a welfare program for foreign contracting corporations. If a particular set of skills is needed at a particular time and place, and a foreign company is the only one in a position to provide that, by all means hire them. But the second a U.S. company is in a position to take over, that better be where the tax money is going. I'm not a big fan of Halliburton, but I'd rather they be the recipient of my tax dollars than Siemens, ABB, or Mitsubishi Estate. Unless someone can come up with a very convincing argument on why spending tax dollars there brings back more benefit to the U.S. taxpayer than keeping it domestic.
We can discuss free markets all we want, but when it becomes an issue of how to spend tax revenue -- that's money essentially taken at gunpoint from citizens and domestic corporations -- I think that the standard has to be a lot higher than what we allow people to spend their money on when its their own decision.
You would think that's the case, but I distinctly remember a particular debate, I think it was the silly "Town Hall" format one, where Kerry just seemed terrified the whole time. Meanwhile, our illustrious President was saying things that might have not made any sense at all, but he seemed comfortable and in-control while doing so -- and that's what plays in Peoria.
I remember watching it on TV that night and thinking to myself, regarding Kerry, "this guy is so bad at relating to people, he's going to lose to somebody who can't pronounce the words 'nuclear' or 'terrorists.'" And lo and behold, he did.
I think this issue came up at one point during the whole RIM/NTP BlackBerry conflict. There was a point at which it looked like NTP's patents were going to get thrown out, and I believe the opinion then by knowledgeable individuals was that it would not affect the previous agreements between RIM and NTP that were reached when the patents had been valid.
Perhaps there is some way for the USPTO to invalidate a patent retroactively, but I somehow doubt it. I think it only changes things going forwards, and the money that's changed hands already would stay where it is. Now perhaps (and this seems likely) some of those other companies that bought licenses might try to sue Amazon to recover a portion of their fees (they have lawyers, they'd find some reason to try), but I don't think there's any sort of automatic restitution or invalidation of previous licensing agreements that were made while the patent was valid.
It's sort of a a caveat emptor thing. The companies that licensed the patent got to use it for as long as it was valid. So in a way by licensing it, they were betting that it would remain intact for a while. If it doesn't, they lose.
That said, I don't think the patent will get overturned. I'm way too cynical at this point to believe that the USPTO would ever do something that makes that much sense, although they did invalidate the claims on that sideways-swinging patent. I suppose anything could happen. Maybe somebody tripped and hit their head hard, and forgot that they're supposed to be a revenue source and not an actual public-serving government agency.
Maybe this is a test case (Score:1) by rc-flyer (20492) on Friday October 22, @06:23AM (#1594515) I really hope they lose. Their One-Click technology is nothing more than the use of cookies in a somewhat secure fashion, possibly coupled with some data storage on their computer. It would be really nice if the courts come out with a major statement on this regarding how silly these software patents really are.
I think I just snarfed some coffee. I had forgotten there had been a time before everyone realized our government had sold us up the river.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you woefully overestimate the intelligence and market sway of the average consumer.
What the whole ICT issue is going to do is create an extra upgrade cycle: everybody will get on the HD bandwagon now, and in a few years they'll roll out HDCP, and in order to watch new content, people will get new televisions.
This works well for the electronics manufacturers, because they get another shot at replacing a good chunk of the public's equipment in a few years, and although it slows the studios getting total content control by a few years, they'll still get what they want in the end.
Particularly because I don't expect the MPAA et al. to be idle in the meantime before the ICT rollout. On the contrary: I suspect they'll be watching the non-HDCP HD rollout very closely, and tallying up ridiculous numbers of dollars lost to "piracy" and "home copying", so that when HDCP comes, it won't just come from the studios, it'll have the full weight of Congress behind it.
True, but every car on the road today in the U.S. (or at least the great, great majority of them) have a fairly substantial mass of palladium already: in the catalytic converter. I'm not sure exactly how much palladium a car would need in order to hold a full charge of hydrogen, but I think if you started recycling the stuff that's in catalytic converters, you'd have a good start towards the amount you'd need to start using it as a hydrogen carrier, at least to start out.
Also, from an environmental standpoint, the fact that it's valuable and rare is probably better than if it were currently cheap, since it keeps it from be being implemented as a throwaway, and creating shortages and problems later on. At least this way, we'll implement the full reclamation cycle from the beginning.
That's not plagiarism, that's copyright infringement.
People seem to confuse these two concepts a lot. They occur together quite often, so I suppose it's understandable, but that doesn't make it correct.
Plagiarism is taking someone else's work for your own. Oftentimes this can be done without actually violating their copyright. For example, see the case of the recent Harvard student who got her book pulled because of passages that were very close to another book's. The passages aren't identical, and there's probably no grounds for a copyright violation suit, but that didn't help the author from getting her book deal pulled. If I copy something you wrote wholesale and say I wrote it, then it would be both a copyright violation and plagiarism, but I could rewrite it such that it's not a copyright violation, "forget" to attribute the source, and still be in trouble in terms of professional ethics.
I could violate your copyright without plagiarizing anything, as well. I could for example copy and redistribute something you wrote, with correct attributions, but without your permission. (One could argue that this is also unethical, but that's a separate can of worms.) Then you'd probably be able to go after me under the copyright laws.
This latter case is what happens in many blogs, and just generally on the internet, all the time. I think most of the time it's well-intentioned: a blogger wants to use some material, but knows that links are unstable, so just reposts it with attribution instead, thinking that this makes it OK. It's not, unless the original author has given permission. A certain amount of excerpting is allowed by fair-use rules, but this generally doesn't make a complete copy-and-paste repost of somebody else's article defensible.
In general, when people talk about plagiarism, they are talking about an issue of professional and personal ethics, particularly within academia, and which is independent of issues of copyright. Likewise, copyright violations are a legal issue, and can occur independently of ethical issues (assuming you don't blanket-assume that all violations of the law are inherently unethical). There are obviously grey areas and large exceptions to this generalization, but I think that's a fair starting point.
Just as an addition, the "Off-the-Record (OTR) Messaging" plugin for Gaim offers a similar setup for instant messaging. (You can use it with other IM clients as well; it works with stock AIM as an HTTP proxy and is built in to Adium for Mac.)
In my opinion, it's a much better system than some of the other IM encryption setups, which give you authentication but not any forward secrecy or deniability. Basically it forces you to authenticate the other party via a side-channel, rather than using a trust framework a la PGP, but in return the authentication can't be turned around and used against you after the fact.
It does this via an unauthenticated Diffie-Hellman key exchange, and then creating and exchanging a per-session symmetric key within that channel, which is destroyed at the end of the conversation. More technical information is available here.
In short it provides more authentication than Trillian's setup, more deniability than gaim-encryption, and doesn't require any of the infrastructure required by SILC. The only difficulty in using it is getting other people to use a supported client program and to install the plugin / generate a key.
I think there's room for both types of encrypted communications: ones that provide a trust framework and robust authentication, and ones that provide for more deniability (and allow the computerized century equivalents of a face-to-face meeting, where if both people desire it, they can deny the contents of the communication later).
any comercial grade encryprtion/decryption program has to have a key short enough to enable real time encryption/decryption using normal computer chips... any key short enough for fast encryption/decryption of things like telephone conversations has to be easily brute forceable.
While I am not any way in favor of government restrictions on encryption, I think this statement is patently false.
A common PC can do real-time encryption/decryption of a telephone-quality digital audio stream with significant key lengths, which are not "easily brute forceable." Or at least, the difficulty of brute forcing them is probably greater than using a side-channel attack.
Symmetric key ciphers (which are what you'd use to actually encrypt the content of a telephone conversation) are quite fast, and a compressed audio stream really isn't that much data. Your statement might be true if the encryption devices were small embedded systems, but even then I'm not sure.
Barring some as-yet-undisclosed jump in computing technology that the government has access to, and normal people do not (which isn't out of the realm of possibility -- for all we know, the NSA might be sitting on a quantum computer, although I rather doubt it), current technologies allow a person to encrypt their data in ways that are fairly difficult to open by brute force, even for an attacker with substantially greater resources than the encryptor.
Too bad the link on their front page is broken (and requires giving zip code + age before you can get to the "Oops! Page not found" result).
r -power-plant-demolition/
I Googled and found this, it's got some links to some cool amateur photos of the implosion:
http://laughingsquid.com/2006/05/11/trojan-nuclea
I was skimming around trying to find more information on the whole MAE East and West facilities. There's not a whole lot out there; they seem to not like to disclose a whole lot about them.
Anyway, I did find this page on Cryptome, which provides some interesting maps and aerial photographs of the various sites.
What interested me most was the area adjacent to the MAE East facility marked "CIA SAIC ET AL". Interesting; not particularly suspicious, given that the CIA HQ isn't far from there, but still interesting placement.
At any rate, regardless of what you think of that unexplained mark on the photo, it's worth looking at the photos. I wonder what (if any) signs they have on the doors. I rather suspect that somewhere in that building is another "secret room" as well.
http://cryptome.org/maee-birdseye.htm
People still pay attention to MTV?
Wait, MTV does music? I thought they were a bad reality-television network.
Agreed. We used to have a water filter/cooler, but it disappeared a few months ago, the excuse being that it had been a "temporary" measure while the drinking fountains were out of commission (3+ years).
I tried to drink the fountain water, but it tastes like it comes out of the shallow end of a YMCA pool.
So now I'm back to bottled water and diet soda; I generally shop around and get water in cases (I try not to pay more than 25 cents per bottle) and diet soda in 12 packs. I've never found the taste of diet soda objectionable, but then again I've basically never known much else. Some of my family members are diabetic so it's always been artificially sweetened sodas as long as I can remember (Fresca and Tab were our mainstays). When I drink a regular Coke, it's like drinking candy. I can't get used to the weird furry feeling it leaves on my teeth.
I mostly go for Diet Coke and Pepsi, because I want the caffeine, and it's easier to open a can of soda than it is to brew a pot of coffee. I've started to think about getting a single-serving machine for the office, but I have a feeling that my co-workers (and my boss) wouldn't appreciate me getting any more strung out on stimulants than I already get from canned beverages.
While CAFC has resulted in some quite bad decisions, it has at least brought some consistency.
I don't know about you, but I'll take a court that returns a wrong/Bad decision 50% of the time, instead of a court that returns a Bad decision 90% of the time, even if the latter is more "consistent."
Consistency isn't necessarily a good thing, if it's in the wrong direction.
Inconsistently good is better than consistently bad any day.
In TFA, one of the patients with the skin condition committed suicide after not receiving any help from the medical establishment, because living with the condition was that bad.
I interpreted the GP's post as agreeing with that sentiment, although I suppose it could also be interpreted as turning the gun on the dermatologist instead.
Either way represents what I believe in the medical community is termed an "adverse outcome."
Interesting -- I had no idea that any wireless-card vendor had actually written Linux drivers and GPLed them. At least recently.
I'm definitely going to be bumping Ralink to the top of my list next time I'm interested in getting hardware, just for that. I sprung for a crappy Best Buy PCI wireless card a few months ago, and ndiswrappers has caused me nothing but pain. Plus, the attitude of the vendors (Netgear and Linksys are both bad) where they use undocumented chipsets, and then change the chipsets seemingly at random, with only subtle clues to mark the difference, just make me feel dirty for giving them my money.
It's nice to know there's a company out there I can buy something from without feeling like I'm supporting the business practices I hate most.
Pity Debian doesn't give Ralink the treatment they deserve; you're right, Ralink should get some applause (although not too much -- let's not forget they did what we'd like to see everyone doing, not something that should be exceptional). I guess nobody has ever accused Debian of moving too quickly, though. Seven months for Debian is barely enough time to start mulling the issue over.
What I was trying to describe (and perhaps failing) was skipping the bytecode step and the whole JIT compilation business.
Go from the Java source to machine-specific binaries, in one step, and distribute the binaries. Just like you'd do with a program written in C and compiled with GCC (or any other language that doesn't use an intermediate language). Nothing in between: Java to binary.
Basically, my question was 'can we separate the strengths and weaknesses of Java as a language from the way it's generally used, with all the bytecode and JIT stuff?'
Was it playing at its full framerate though? If you press Command-I while the video is playing, it'll bring up an informational window that will show the file's framerate, and the rate that it's actually playing at. Quicktime will drop the framerate before it actually starts to studder, so something can look fairly smooth (if you're not looking closely) but on closer inspection might only be playing at 15 or 20 fps.
Not saying that's what's happening, but "it looks good" can be misleading if you're trying to get a benchmark.
These are sub-notebooks.
Back in the day, they used to be called laptops.
That was back before they either got too big to put on your lap, or hot enough to render you sterile.
Now I don't think any company in their right mind would market a "laptop," probably for liability reasons. Heck, my corporate ThinkPad came with a warning sticker that said it was only to be run on hard surfaces. (I will leave the requisite joke about laps and "hard" surfaces to the reader.)
Okay, I may be exposing my ignorance here, not having much experience with Java, but I just have to wonder -- is there something fundamental about the Java language that lends itself to or requires the whole JIT-bytecode thing?
I mean, if it's a Turing-complete language, can't it be compiled into any machine code you want, with the right compiler? Is there some reason why one has never been built?
Why is it that people always tie Java to these JIT compilers? If Java is so slow, can't a direct machine-code/binary compiler be made for it, just like GCC? Sure, it would give away the platform-independence advantage, but it would allow people to optimize sections of Java code for particular architectures without rewriting them in C.
Maybe I'm missing something, because it seems too obvious to not have been created already. But why would Java be inherently any more slow than any other language, if it were directly compiled on an optimized x86 compiler?
Wait and buy them when they're smuggled back into this country after being sold by the people they're given to.
I'll give it maybe three months before they're all over eBay.
And that's even if they're painted some sort of really obnoxious color to distinguish them from legitimately-imported/"non-OLPC" ones. I bet in certain circles, having a 'hot laptop' will be fashionable. (After all, sagging pants originated from prisons, where high-risk inmates aren't given belts. Don't put anything by popular culture.)
They'll never make the computer illegal, they're far too useful as tools for oppression and control. How else do you data-mine the peons' phone calls?
Much like guns, nobody really wants to get rid of all of them, they just want to get rid of yours.
Eventually I suspect that they'll just require you to have a "computer permit," showing that you're not a hacker, terrorist, or pedophile. From there it's trivially easy to ratchet up the qualifications for obtaining a permit (since the permits won't do anything to stop crime, whether cyber- or regular): until you have to pass three background checks, a credit check, give a sample of your DNA, and show your Party membership card to get on the 'net. And a stiff tax, of course: naturally the government will get its pound of flesh for the Treasury. That helps to keep the riffraff out too.
Everyone without a permit will still have some, limited, probably one-way access (the TV networks wouldn't allow it otherwise), but it's just far too dangerous to let them send things. Computers are just far too complicated for the average person; they let you do anything!
That's very true. I would hope that's the case, although I doubt under our current system that it is.
It would seem fair that if you call BS on somebody's patent, and it turns out you're right (and the patent was crap), they ought to foot the bill for the re-examination.
I think you underestimate the use of attachments in a corporate setting, and the amount of user resistance to such a scheme that would require uploading in addition to sending a link. In fact, such a scheme would probably just result in a proliferation of "one button upload" tools that would upload a file to a server and link it in the outgoing document simultaneously, which could then be used by virus writers to spread their payloads. In short, you'd have maybe given then a 6 month hiccup while the tools got written and while they learned to exploit them.
Actually, I could think of a lot of nasty ways you could use such a system to an even greater virus-spreading effect than attachments, since once you got the payload on the server you would only have to spread the link to that one file, and you're spreading the virus. So rather than having to make every user send out a 500kb "word document" to everyone in their address book, they just email everyone in the corporation a link to the file.
And of course, you'd still need to make these "attachment servers" globally accessible at some level, because otherwise there'd be no way for people outside the organization to send attachments in. Blocking all incoming attachments, while it might seem like a good idea to IT people, wouldn't go over well with most employees; there are valid business reasons for wanting to receive attachments from other people (e.g., if a client sends you a PDF, you better damn well not have to tell them "oh, I don't do attachments"). Ever heard of e-faxes? Scan to email?
The only people this would benefit are the software companies that would make the tools to run the servers that would host these "detached attachments" and sell the new versions of the email software that everyone would have to upgrade to, in order to use them.
The only "solutions" to these problems are using operating systems that are more secure, coupled with educating users on good security practices. But given that there's a general lack of common sense in the population in all things, not just limited to computers, I think the latter is probably a long shot. A trite solution like moving attachments to a server wouldn't help much.
What's funnier is Apple used to allow that (computer to computer, not computer to portable device, though) but had to pull the feature because of the problems it raised regarding piracy; it was about the same time they started into negotiations with the record labels over iTMS, I think.
You could boot up iTunes on any computer, hit Connect (from the Advanced menu, I believe) type in your home computer's address, and instantly you'd have access to your music library remotely. It was quite brilliant at the time, I used to use it to listen to music on my PowerBook without taking up its hard drive.
I suspect any other 'worldwide streaming' feature that didn't come with gobs and gobs of mandatory DRM would probably meet a similar fate.
Agreed, with reservations.
I'd much rather see my tax dollars ending up in a company inside the US than being funneled to a foreign economy somewhere.
That said, I'm not sure how you can really avoid this anymore. If you can buy a computer which is both assembled and has a majority of its parts made in this country, I'd really like to know where to get one (and how many thousands of dollars it costs). Except for food, pretty much anything that gets bought, either by a private citizen or the government, is going to increase our current-account deficit.
I admit to not being an economist, so when I get told by people knowledgeable in these things that "free trade helps our economy more than it hurts it," I have to basically shrug and agree. Maybe it's more advantageous to have completely free trade than to engage in protectionism. It sure doesn't seem like this intuitively; in fact it really seems like we're dying the death of a thousand cuts as we slowly outsource everything, and are on a path that seems suspiciously unsustainable. If this is not the case, if a complete "service economy," where everybody is getting paid for doing something and then turning around and spending their paycheck to buy imported goods, is infinitely sustainable, than that argument sure isn't being sold to the American public very well, because there are a lot of people more unhappy than I with the current direction. (And I'm not talking about politics / disliking the President here, we're talking about things bigger than any one administration.)
But at the very least, I think the government has a responsibility not to take money out of my paycheck and spend it on foreign goods and foreign corporations, as long as there are domestic producers offering the same or equivalent services, at any price. Or perhaps, unless the foreign corporation is willing to sell it at a price lower than the U.S. corporations price, after the taxes that the U.S. corporation returns, and its U.S. employees return, and its other contributions to the economy return. Or perhaps we could invite foreign corporations who want to be on equal footing with U.S. contractors to start paying taxes here, equivalent to what they'd pay as a domestic organization.
On a slight tangent: I feel the same way with the Iraq reconstruction efforts. I found it slightly comical when the European governments were protesting about the number of U.S. reconstruction contracts going to U.S. companies. Can you say, "no shit, Sherlock?" Unless they're needed for some particular skill that simply isn't obtainable from a U.S. contractor, there better not be any European companies on the taxpayer payroll over there. Opinions on the war, WMDs, and "Iraqi Freedom" aside, I think we can all agree that it was never sold to the public as a welfare program for foreign contracting corporations. If a particular set of skills is needed at a particular time and place, and a foreign company is the only one in a position to provide that, by all means hire them. But the second a U.S. company is in a position to take over, that better be where the tax money is going. I'm not a big fan of Halliburton, but I'd rather they be the recipient of my tax dollars than Siemens, ABB, or Mitsubishi Estate. Unless someone can come up with a very convincing argument on why spending tax dollars there brings back more benefit to the U.S. taxpayer than keeping it domestic.
We can discuss free markets all we want, but when it becomes an issue of how to spend tax revenue -- that's money essentially taken at gunpoint from citizens and domestic corporations -- I think that the standard has to be a lot higher than what we allow people to spend their money on when its their own decision.
You would think that's the case, but I distinctly remember a particular debate, I think it was the silly "Town Hall" format one, where Kerry just seemed terrified the whole time. Meanwhile, our illustrious President was saying things that might have not made any sense at all, but he seemed comfortable and in-control while doing so -- and that's what plays in Peoria.
I remember watching it on TV that night and thinking to myself, regarding Kerry, "this guy is so bad at relating to people, he's going to lose to somebody who can't pronounce the words 'nuclear' or 'terrorists.'" And lo and behold, he did.
I don't think so.
I think this issue came up at one point during the whole RIM/NTP BlackBerry conflict. There was a point at which it looked like NTP's patents were going to get thrown out, and I believe the opinion then by knowledgeable individuals was that it would not affect the previous agreements between RIM and NTP that were reached when the patents had been valid.
Perhaps there is some way for the USPTO to invalidate a patent retroactively, but I somehow doubt it. I think it only changes things going forwards, and the money that's changed hands already would stay where it is. Now perhaps (and this seems likely) some of those other companies that bought licenses might try to sue Amazon to recover a portion of their fees (they have lawyers, they'd find some reason to try), but I don't think there's any sort of automatic restitution or invalidation of previous licensing agreements that were made while the patent was valid.
It's sort of a a caveat emptor thing. The companies that licensed the patent got to use it for as long as it was valid. So in a way by licensing it, they were betting that it would remain intact for a while. If it doesn't, they lose.
That said, I don't think the patent will get overturned. I'm way too cynical at this point to believe that the USPTO would ever do something that makes that much sense, although they did invalidate the claims on that sideways-swinging patent. I suppose anything could happen. Maybe somebody tripped and hit their head hard, and forgot that they're supposed to be a revenue source and not an actual public-serving government agency.