Is reporting it to the BSA necessary or even adequate? They are a private entity, not the police.
Also the mere presence at the scene of a crime may not be sufficient for accessory, that would be considered accidental and not encouraging of the crime or its repetition through inaction.
If this wasn't the case it would impossible to legally operate a computer repair business without filing a police report on every customer with an unauthorized copy of something on their hard disk.
IANAL but I would call to question if the guy was actually in a position of liability simply by virtue of having discovered the software.
In acoustics measurement and audio engineering the criteria are completely objective, and the only thing that really matters is linearity. Unfortunately these are generally the very expensive systems because essentially nothing about loudspeakers is actually linear, in particular a loudspeaker voice coil is only approximately linear for small excursions where the magnetic field lines are approximately linear.
Sound quality on the other hand is highly subjective and people generally prefer a moderate amount of dynamic range compression which improves intelligebility in a noisy environment, and some harmonic distortion is also nearly universally preferred since it makes it sound more "rich" from the spectral smearing.
Historically the quality of amplification electronics in audio gear has gone up significantly over the last few decades, and at the same time the price of those components has gone way way down thanks to class-D amps that synthesize a time-varying voltage using high-speed digital switching. However, the quality of the actual loudspeakers has gone down dramatically, mainly because of the strong consumer preference for sound systems that are exceedingly small and/or integrated into television sets. Back in the '70s a loudspeaker was accepted as part of the furniture landscape, but no longer, and this is a huge disaster for sound quality as there is simply no way to make a full range system without a large surface area that enables the low-impedance coupling of the driver with the air. At the absolute smallest a full-range speaker cone should be at least 4 inches in a cabinet with about 6 inches depth... which certainly won't fit in my macbook...:(
I'll bet if they polled people they would also say they hate email, probably even more than facebook. Email sucks--its impersonal and most people don't have the level of skill to use it effectively (i.e. reading, writing and typing), but they do anyways and doing so inflict their ignorance on the world.
Email sucks, so does facebook. Google sucks too, the web is full of useless spam and so are their search results. In fact computers basically just suck in general and have a huge potential for improvement at the human-interface level. G+ already sucks too, but marginally less so than the alternatives which is still enough that people will be jumping ship like rats as soon as they open the floodgates.
I went through YUL (Montreal) a couple weeks ago and they had security drones with wireless barcode scanners checking boarding passes at every identifiable stage of the queue. By the time I got through security my boarding pass had been scanned no less than 12 times, which was a rather annoying experience. One of the drones said this was being done to measure time between different parts of the process.
So thats manual queue tracking on crack or something, but point being people are already conveying unique-id tracked pieces of paper...
Pilots expect to go through the machine every day over a 30 year career, and they already have the highest radiation exposure of any job except maybe astronauts. The addition of the backscatter machine increases their exposure by about 0.1% which is small but not totally insignificant. That said they are still well under the federal occupational limit of 5000 mrem per year.
Given the facts my best guess is that the pilot unions are actually more concerned about issues of privacy and humane treatment by TSA staff, and raising the issue of the backscatter machine is a tactic for gaining leverage in negotiations about things they actually care about.
- Eat cookies - Take a nap - Check the time again - Double check your math - Triple check your math - Check the time again - Put on Nike shoes - Repent - Burn down a church* - Buy stocks - Buy a sports car -...Profit?
The dynamics of in-app purchases change the basic nature of game play, that much is certain. I think those dynamics present a conflict of interest or at least a moral dilemma of some sort. For example developers are motivated to create exceedingly frustrating and/or impossible "scenarios" that can be by-passed with a purchase, where those scenarios don't crop up until the user is sufficiently invested in the game-play to consider making the purchase. Its one thing to sell add ons / extra levels, its another to manipulate user behavior through what is essentially a form of false advertising. In the razor/blades scenario, we can at least say that the blades have a concrete value and the user can estimate the total cost of using that platform over time. Not so with a game that may require some unknown number of additional purchases to play. Its more like the neighborhood crack dealer "first hit is free" promotion.
Apple should revise the app-store policy to include consideration of how in-app purchase mechanisms are used. They already have a plethora of criteria based on what are essentially moral grounds, which is already a key value proposition of their app store vs the competition. Since they are presumably already benefiting from in-app revenue it might take a bit of convincing before they see the light (such as a class action lawsuit?).
Find a different algorithm to produce the same (or similar enough) results, and the patent isn't an issue.
This is only true if the output product of an algorithm is itself not patentable (e.g. it is obvious, not novel, etc), in which case someone is just wasting time and money on the patent process anyways.
Otherwise, according to the doctrine of equivalence an alternative algorithm will still be infringing if it produces identical results. For example its not possible to patent "a compression algorithm" but if someone had a patent on an algorithm for producing a specific kind of compressed data structure (e.g. MP3), it would be infringing to use an alternative algorithm that produced identical (or substantially similar) output. That alternative algorithm might actually be useful and is in fact patentable, for example if it was faster, more reliable, etc., but the patent holder would still have to license the original algorithm first to practice the invention (as it is deemed an improvement over a prior art so it is dependent on that). A patent does not necessarily grant the right to practice the invention.
Note there may be significant differences in the interpretation of the doctrine of equivalents depending on jurisdiction (see Wikipedia).
Fair use is an aspect of copyright law created by the intersection of two conflicting positive rights: one being the right to make scientific progress and intellectual inquiry, and the other being the right to economic protection of intellectual property.
As for the Righthaven cases, it appears that many (but not all) of the alleged violations are blatant by most criteria (verbatim reproduction of entire articles), however the amount of actual economic damage done is arguably to zero (a lawsuit over a post on soc.retirement? really??). On the other hand, people should be a bit more careful when posting stuff like that on public forums... probably not the brightest idea...
There are plenty of consumer products that are harmful or even lethal if mishandled. But the hot coffee case isn't about the product at all, its about having sensible safety precautions for customers that are appropriate to the context where business is conducted. Specifically, an item handed to people through a car window shouldn't be one that is is dangerous to their health if it is mishandled, because the car is an environment where mishandling of such items is likely. Keep in mind that the temperature of McDonalds coffee wasn't just an incidental artifact of setting the dial wrong on the machine that day, it was a company-wide policy.
Suppose I ran a lumber supply company, and the floor of the store was littered with broken 2x4s with rusty nails sticking out. People know better than to step on nails, so thats no problem right? Well it doesn't matter if people should "know better", it just isn't ethical to run a business with that level of inherent danger to the customer.
Its also true that we tend to push the protections a bit far sometimes in America, in particular when compared to Europe. But in Europe they also have things like universal health care, so its likely that the woman in this case would not have been stuck with the medical bill if this happened in an EU country, and it was the medical bill that started the whole lawsuit off in the first place.
In the case of the US government most of the tax money gets spent on weapons and the military, which has no real benefit to anyone except the defense industry. A little readjustment of priorities would go a long way towards making government spending beneficial to society in general.
IMHO the most fair form of taxation would be only on money that is taken out of circulation, i.e. whatever is *not* spent at the end of the year, the exact inverse of sales tax. Money saved is by definition in excess of what is needed. In the days of commodity-as-currency the limited lifespan of currency was a feature.
Re:Drupal Drupal ... Drupal. wft is Drupal?
on
Drupal 7
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Actually the project is a testbed for some software algorithms for optimal control of systems in the context of variable power availability (as is the case with solar). Presumably this "smart" controller can achieve significantly higher throughput than a naive approach, for example it can probably optimize the process so that the power-consuming components are operating in their most efficient range over a wide range of input power availability.
The components of the device are all off the shelf items, the component engineering and related issues are not part of the research scope.
Sonar and radar arrays have a narrow operating bandwidth, usually just a single frequency. The audio domain is wide bandwidth (20-20khz) which makes the beamforming problem significantly more challenging.
Expected earthquake power is entirely predictable from the buildup of potential energy, which is a constant factor over time (inches per year). This energy is held in the elastic property of the plates and retained by a friction "potential well". Occasionally the friction coefficient is overcome and the plate "snaps" converting potential into kinetic energy, and the magnitude of the energy conversion follows an exponential distribution.
The accumulated stress since the last "big one" is more or less exactly equal to the predicted magnitude of the next "big one", the only unknown is when. For example the magnitude of the recent quake in Haiti exactly correlates with the last 200 years of stress build up since the last major quake in that area, and similar predictions will be true for the San Francisco area which is "due" since it has been over 100 years since the last major quake.
Anyways the point is that if it were possible to trigger a small earthquake, this would actually be beneficial since it reduces stress at the fault in a controlled way, although very many small earthquakes would be needed to prevent a large earthquake. Furthermore, if someone were to manage to trigger a large earthquake then it would be no worse than the amount of potential energy stored in the fault line, which is going to be released at some point anyways, which in term of culpability is sort of like blaming someone for causing a fire by dropping a cigarette into a field of dry grass. In other words, mining and drilling cannot cause earthquakes, it can only trigger them.
In science we go to great effort to construct representations of numerical information in the most perceptually meaningful way, units such as the decibel, richter scale, and log-units are used heavily. And that isn't because scientists can't do math.
Meanwhile EPA-mandated stickers continue to prominently list a metric (in large fonts and first position on lists), MPG, that is both non-linear and also proven in research studies to cause incorrect estimations by consumers. Its not that we need more information on the sticker, but we do need more meaningful information on the sticker. MPG shouldn't even be listed, its that misleading.
Facing oncoming traffic is safer because you have better visibility of the vehicles that are in close proximity. However, it is more dangerous for a bicyclist to ride against traffic because cars entering and leaving the roadway don't anticipate an approaching bicycle on that side of the road (drivers tend to only look "upstream" when turning). Unlike bicyclists, pedestrians have an effective speed of zero and are also expected to stop and wait for safe conditions at every intersection, so they can safely employ the "wrong" side of the road and get some advantages from the better visibility.
Parking fines are are a non-democratic means that the city uses to fund certain operations that, for whatever reason be it lack of popularity or laziness, are not otherwise provisioned by legitimate sources of revenue that are approved by the public opinion. Its a clear conflict of interest and the injustice of fining is so obvious that its one of the leading frustrations that people cite in discussions of government annoyances. But I think we should differentiate between objections to what is essentially government corruption versus an objection to democratic governance in general.
A contemporary theory is that the stones are actually poured concrete that is molded in-place rather than carved and hoisted to position... makes quite a bit more sense and it just takes a lot of brute force to get it there, no fancy engineering really...
I think all government imposed fines need to follow the same rules for reasonable behavior that we already impose on private companies. The utility company is not allowed to charge more than standard interest rate on late payments. Even credit card companies can't exceed something like 26% APY, and yet the city government parking fines jump up 100-300% if you are late, and similar punishments from the IRS etc significantly exceed market rates. Where is the financial equivalent of "cruel and unreasonable" punishment?
Furthermore there is a persistent problem with the government directing money from fines into public services and other projects. This creates an implicit motivation to fine people as a substitute for taxation. And if there are private contractors involved (as in the traffic camera companies) then they are motivated to hide the dirty deed. And since we don't vote on the fines, they can fund various services without public review. Fines also don't have any notion of social equity in terms of who pays them, its just a very bad way to fund anything.
We need two things: 1) independent (non-vested interest) review of all fines for reasonable formulation as well as a fair application with a provable justification that the fine has the deterrent effect in accordance with its stated purpose, 2) All money collected from government fines should go into a fund with extremely rigid rules about what it can be used for to eliminate conflicts of interest. For example it could go to fund public-financing of elections (the recipients are many individuals with turnover so there is little reason to try to manipulate the system). Or it could go into an emergency reserve fund or some other non-liquid asset.
Slashdot Mirror
Is reporting it to the BSA necessary or even adequate? They are a private entity, not the police.
Also the mere presence at the scene of a crime may not be sufficient for accessory, that would be considered accidental and not encouraging of the crime or its repetition through inaction.
If this wasn't the case it would impossible to legally operate a computer repair business without filing a police report on every customer with an unauthorized copy of something on their hard disk.
IANAL but I would call to question if the guy was actually in a position of liability simply by virtue of having discovered the software.
In acoustics measurement and audio engineering the criteria are completely objective, and the only thing that really matters is linearity. Unfortunately these are generally the very expensive systems because essentially nothing about loudspeakers is actually linear, in particular a loudspeaker voice coil is only approximately linear for small excursions where the magnetic field lines are approximately linear.
Sound quality on the other hand is highly subjective and people generally prefer a moderate amount of dynamic range compression which improves intelligebility in a noisy environment, and some harmonic distortion is also nearly universally preferred since it makes it sound more "rich" from the spectral smearing.
Historically the quality of amplification electronics in audio gear has gone up significantly over the last few decades, and at the same time the price of those components has gone way way down thanks to class-D amps that synthesize a time-varying voltage using high-speed digital switching. However, the quality of the actual loudspeakers has gone down dramatically, mainly because of the strong consumer preference for sound systems that are exceedingly small and/or integrated into television sets. Back in the '70s a loudspeaker was accepted as part of the furniture landscape, but no longer, and this is a huge disaster for sound quality as there is simply no way to make a full range system without a large surface area that enables the low-impedance coupling of the driver with the air. At the absolute smallest a full-range speaker cone should be at least 4 inches in a cabinet with about 6 inches depth... which certainly won't fit in my macbook... :(
With 38 km^2 of glass, its a window washer's wet dream...!
I'll bet if they polled people they would also say they hate email, probably even more than facebook. Email sucks--its impersonal and most people don't have the level of skill to use it effectively (i.e. reading, writing and typing), but they do anyways and doing so inflict their ignorance on the world.
Email sucks, so does facebook. Google sucks too, the web is full of useless spam and so are their search results. In fact computers basically just suck in general and have a huge potential for improvement at the human-interface level. G+ already sucks too, but marginally less so than the alternatives which is still enough that people will be jumping ship like rats as soon as they open the floodgates.
Somebody should let Rupert Murdoch know, he likes to buy imploding social networks.
I went through YUL (Montreal) a couple weeks ago and they had security drones with wireless barcode scanners checking boarding passes at every identifiable stage of the queue. By the time I got through security my boarding pass had been scanned no less than 12 times, which was a rather annoying experience. One of the drones said this was being done to measure time between different parts of the process.
So thats manual queue tracking on crack or something, but point being people are already conveying unique-id tracked pieces of paper...
Pilots expect to go through the machine every day over a 30 year career, and they already have the highest radiation exposure of any job except maybe astronauts. The addition of the backscatter machine increases their exposure by about 0.1% which is small but not totally insignificant. That said they are still well under the federal occupational limit of 5000 mrem per year.
Given the facts my best guess is that the pilot unions are actually more concerned about issues of privacy and humane treatment by TSA staff, and raising the issue of the backscatter machine is a tactic for gaining leverage in negotiations about things they actually care about.
High-altitude flight in a passenger plane exposes the body to a dose of radiation much larger than the backscatter machine.
- Eat cookies ...Profit?
- Take a nap
- Check the time again
- Double check your math
- Triple check your math
- Check the time again
- Put on Nike shoes
- Repent
- Burn down a church*
- Buy stocks
- Buy a sports car
-
* Not an actual suggestion
The dynamics of in-app purchases change the basic nature of game play, that much is certain. I think those dynamics present a conflict of interest or at least a moral dilemma of some sort. For example developers are motivated to create exceedingly frustrating and/or impossible "scenarios" that can be by-passed with a purchase, where those scenarios don't crop up until the user is sufficiently invested in the game-play to consider making the purchase. Its one thing to sell add ons / extra levels, its another to manipulate user behavior through what is essentially a form of false advertising. In the razor/blades scenario, we can at least say that the blades have a concrete value and the user can estimate the total cost of using that platform over time. Not so with a game that may require some unknown number of additional purchases to play. Its more like the neighborhood crack dealer "first hit is free" promotion.
Apple should revise the app-store policy to include consideration of how in-app purchase mechanisms are used. They already have a plethora of criteria based on what are essentially moral grounds, which is already a key value proposition of their app store vs the competition. Since they are presumably already benefiting from in-app revenue it might take a bit of convincing before they see the light (such as a class action lawsuit?).
Find a different algorithm to produce the same (or similar enough) results, and the patent isn't an issue.
This is only true if the output product of an algorithm is itself not patentable (e.g. it is obvious, not novel, etc), in which case someone is just wasting time and money on the patent process anyways.
Otherwise, according to the doctrine of equivalence an alternative algorithm will still be infringing if it produces identical results. For example its not possible to patent "a compression algorithm" but if someone had a patent on an algorithm for producing a specific kind of compressed data structure (e.g. MP3), it would be infringing to use an alternative algorithm that produced identical (or substantially similar) output. That alternative algorithm might actually be useful and is in fact patentable, for example if it was faster, more reliable, etc., but the patent holder would still have to license the original algorithm first to practice the invention (as it is deemed an improvement over a prior art so it is dependent on that). A patent does not necessarily grant the right to practice the invention.
Note there may be significant differences in the interpretation of the doctrine of equivalents depending on jurisdiction (see Wikipedia).
Fair use is an aspect of copyright law created by the intersection of two conflicting positive rights: one being the right to make scientific progress and intellectual inquiry, and the other being the right to economic protection of intellectual property.
As for the Righthaven cases, it appears that many (but not all) of the alleged violations are blatant by most criteria (verbatim reproduction of entire articles), however the amount of actual economic damage done is arguably to zero (a lawsuit over a post on soc.retirement? really??). On the other hand, people should be a bit more careful when posting stuff like that on public forums... probably not the brightest idea...
There are plenty of consumer products that are harmful or even lethal if mishandled. But the hot coffee case isn't about the product at all, its about having sensible safety precautions for customers that are appropriate to the context where business is conducted. Specifically, an item handed to people through a car window shouldn't be one that is is dangerous to their health if it is mishandled, because the car is an environment where mishandling of such items is likely. Keep in mind that the temperature of McDonalds coffee wasn't just an incidental artifact of setting the dial wrong on the machine that day, it was a company-wide policy.
Suppose I ran a lumber supply company, and the floor of the store was littered with broken 2x4s with rusty nails sticking out. People know better than to step on nails, so thats no problem right? Well it doesn't matter if people should "know better", it just isn't ethical to run a business with that level of inherent danger to the customer.
Its also true that we tend to push the protections a bit far sometimes in America, in particular when compared to Europe. But in Europe they also have things like universal health care, so its likely that the woman in this case would not have been stuck with the medical bill if this happened in an EU country, and it was the medical bill that started the whole lawsuit off in the first place.
In the case of the US government most of the tax money gets spent on weapons and the military, which has no real benefit to anyone except the defense industry. A little readjustment of priorities would go a long way towards making government spending beneficial to society in general.
IMHO the most fair form of taxation would be only on money that is taken out of circulation, i.e. whatever is *not* spent at the end of the year, the exact inverse of sales tax. Money saved is by definition in excess of what is needed. In the days of commodity-as-currency the limited lifespan of currency was a feature.
Yup, the biggest of them all.
Actually the project is a testbed for some software algorithms for optimal control of systems in the context of variable power availability (as is the case with solar). Presumably this "smart" controller can achieve significantly higher throughput than a naive approach, for example it can probably optimize the process so that the power-consuming components are operating in their most efficient range over a wide range of input power availability.
The components of the device are all off the shelf items, the component engineering and related issues are not part of the research scope.
The project is better described on the research group's website: http://robots.mit.edu/projects/KFUPM/index.html
Yeah they are in it for the sex! Duh.
Sonar and radar arrays have a narrow operating bandwidth, usually just a single frequency. The audio domain is wide bandwidth (20-20khz) which makes the beamforming problem significantly more challenging.
Expected earthquake power is entirely predictable from the buildup of potential energy, which is a constant factor over time (inches per year). This energy is held in the elastic property of the plates and retained by a friction "potential well". Occasionally the friction coefficient is overcome and the plate "snaps" converting potential into kinetic energy, and the magnitude of the energy conversion follows an exponential distribution.
The accumulated stress since the last "big one" is more or less exactly equal to the predicted magnitude of the next "big one", the only unknown is when. For example the magnitude of the recent quake in Haiti exactly correlates with the last 200 years of stress build up since the last major quake in that area, and similar predictions will be true for the San Francisco area which is "due" since it has been over 100 years since the last major quake.
Anyways the point is that if it were possible to trigger a small earthquake, this would actually be beneficial since it reduces stress at the fault in a controlled way, although very many small earthquakes would be needed to prevent a large earthquake. Furthermore, if someone were to manage to trigger a large earthquake then it would be no worse than the amount of potential energy stored in the fault line, which is going to be released at some point anyways, which in term of culpability is sort of like blaming someone for causing a fire by dropping a cigarette into a field of dry grass. In other words, mining and drilling cannot cause earthquakes, it can only trigger them.
In science we go to great effort to construct representations of numerical information in the most perceptually meaningful way, units such as the decibel, richter scale, and log-units are used heavily. And that isn't because scientists can't do math.
Meanwhile EPA-mandated stickers continue to prominently list a metric (in large fonts and first position on lists), MPG, that is both non-linear and also proven in research studies to cause incorrect estimations by consumers. Its not that we need more information on the sticker, but we do need more meaningful information on the sticker. MPG shouldn't even be listed, its that misleading.
Facing oncoming traffic is safer because you have better visibility of the vehicles that are in close proximity. However, it is more dangerous for a bicyclist to ride against traffic because cars entering and leaving the roadway don't anticipate an approaching bicycle on that side of the road (drivers tend to only look "upstream" when turning). Unlike bicyclists, pedestrians have an effective speed of zero and are also expected to stop and wait for safe conditions at every intersection, so they can safely employ the "wrong" side of the road and get some advantages from the better visibility.
Parking fines are are a non-democratic means that the city uses to fund certain operations that, for whatever reason be it lack of popularity or laziness, are not otherwise provisioned by legitimate sources of revenue that are approved by the public opinion. Its a clear conflict of interest and the injustice of fining is so obvious that its one of the leading frustrations that people cite in discussions of government annoyances. But I think we should differentiate between objections to what is essentially government corruption versus an objection to democratic governance in general.
A contemporary theory is that the stones are actually poured concrete that is molded in-place rather than carved and hoisted to position... makes quite a bit more sense and it just takes a lot of brute force to get it there, no fancy engineering really...
I think all government imposed fines need to follow the same rules for reasonable behavior that we already impose on private companies. The utility company is not allowed to charge more than standard interest rate on late payments. Even credit card companies can't exceed something like 26% APY, and yet the city government parking fines jump up 100-300% if you are late, and similar punishments from the IRS etc significantly exceed market rates. Where is the financial equivalent of "cruel and unreasonable" punishment?
Furthermore there is a persistent problem with the government directing money from fines into public services and other projects. This creates an implicit motivation to fine people as a substitute for taxation. And if there are private contractors involved (as in the traffic camera companies) then they are motivated to hide the dirty deed. And since we don't vote on the fines, they can fund various services without public review. Fines also don't have any notion of social equity in terms of who pays them, its just a very bad way to fund anything.
We need two things: 1) independent (non-vested interest) review of all fines for reasonable formulation as well as a fair application with a provable justification that the fine has the deterrent effect in accordance with its stated purpose, 2) All money collected from government fines should go into a fund with extremely rigid rules about what it can be used for to eliminate conflicts of interest. For example it could go to fund public-financing of elections (the recipients are many individuals with turnover so there is little reason to try to manipulate the system). Or it could go into an emergency reserve fund or some other non-liquid asset.