Insects are arthropods - as are lobsters, shrimps etc. Lobster is not commonly regarded as disgusting and horrible. Can you justify why a land-dwelling arthropod is more disgusting and horrifying than a sea-dwelling one? The insect could very well be a pure vegetarian, whereas many of the sea-dwelling ones we eat are scavengers (e.g. crabs) which flourish on carrion and sewage.
The problem is not the absolute levels, it is the changes. The ecosystem we live in is adapted to whatever lakes etc. output - they have been doing it for millions of years. The problem is the change - we are suddenly adding a whole lot of extra C02 and CH4 into a system that was (moderately) stable. In the long term, there is no problem: in a few hundred thousand years, a new equilibrium will be found and the Earth will trundle happily on. So if you don't mind a few billion human deaths over the next few generations, there is no problem at all. The Earth is in fine condition - it is only seething humanity that has a problem. And the human race is not at risk - billions will not die. So if you are happy to treat humans as we treat cattle (or insects) there is no problem.
The problem is not with/his/ connection, it is with/some link somewhere/ in the internet which has maxed out. He has no idea where it is, nor probably does anyone else including that link's owner. Of course, you expect that to happen, and many internet protocols, particularly including TCP, have sophisticated and well tested mechanisms for throttling back when they detect congestion in their path and slowing their transmissions in a manner which actually works very well at sharing the available bandwidth, But there is a critical phrase in that last sentence: *when they detect congestion*. Large amounts of buffering in the system delays the point at which the sender realizes that packets have been dropped and throttles back. Then a large number of packets get dropped, so the sender scales back a long way to dead slow, and slowly speeds up until it detects packet loss. But, because of buffering, by the time packet loss is detected, it is already sending far faster than the remote choke-point can handle.
By analogy, think of driving a car whose brakes have a one second delay before they go on, and then go to full emergency stop. You would progress in a very stuttery and uncomfortable manner, and on average not very fast. That, he says, is what is increasingly happening to out internet connections. Huge buffers fool senders into thinking that there is lots of bandwidth, and then discard scads of data which has to be retransmitted.
He implies that QoS all the way would alleviate this problem - but that seems incompatible with current pressures for Net Neutrality. At the moment, the end consumer has no access to QoS.
From the summary, the implication is that the data analysis was not proper - or at least, not shown to be proper. Since the claimed effect is a fairly small artifact only detectable by sophistcated statistics, it seems reasonable that the reviewers should include those who have a deep understanding of such statistics - which, it is claimed, they did not.
In my experience, some people actually target techies. Some years ago I searched for a deeply technical term, and was surprised to get a porn site near the tp of the screen, I actaully went and looked at the source, and found that the meta-tags were full of technical terms, relating to fibre-optic data transmission etc. The search engines have probably got gaurds against this now, but it shows that spammers are actively looking for techies. It might be that they are seen as relatively affluent sad loners who would buy their alleged products. Whether they put in the corresponding discount for net awareness and higher than average intelligence, I doubt.
As I understand it, if you are being physically threatened, there is no ambiguity: you are allowed to defend yourself until the threat goes away.
I very much agree with your point about escalation, which is why I do not think it would be a good idea to have weapon around. Any intruder is likely to be more of a desperado than you or me and if realistically threatened is likely to escalate much faster and much further.
For the particular threat you mention, if that is becoming a local speciality, how about a set of false keys to give up under threat? They are out of the house and you are on to the phone to the police before they know they are false.
I believe that the police give the benefit of the doubt in most such cases. And remember that for a prosecution to stand against you, a jury would have to find you guilty beyond reasonable doubt (though I can understand the the suffering caused by even a failed prosecution).
T And victims are often prosecuted if they do anything to try to protect themselves
Can you provide evidence to justify this? It is a widespread belief, but the law authorities claim it is not true. In all the cases I have seen, there was pretty good evidence that the accused wend beyond self-defence (legal) to retribution (illegal).
Of course, the belief itself is damaging to society - but I am afraid we have the tabloid press to blame for that.
On the other hand, international comparisons show that the most successful school systems are the ones where teachers are recruited from the high flyers. Finland was given as an example. From the article (in The Economist) it seemed that a really good teacher was far more important than class size, one of the things that people fight for. The conclusion seemed to be to pay, and respect, teachers more so that high flyers see teaching as a worthwhile career, and let class sizes grow if they have to.
Name me/one/ patent that is protecting some companies product.
Yes, I do believe that companies will do as you say they won't. Has Apple dominated the MP2 player, smart phone, and tablet markets because patents stop people building competitive products? No, it has succeeded because it is a better systems and marketing company. Patents don't stop people competing: it is too easy to work around most of them. They add obstacles and add to the cost of doing business, which harms the whole community. But, outside pharmaceuticals, I cannot think of any cases where people embarked or research depending upon the patent system to protect the result.
But in these cases, either the defendants in the cases deliberately infringed by reading the patents, which I strongly doubt, or they copied an obvious feature, in which case secrets are of no value, or the parallel-invented it, just a bit later, which is a common case.
Too many patents, of which one-click is the most notorious, are ideas which become obvious when a certain state of the art is reached. Nobody has the idea before the underlying technology reaches a certain point; once it reaches that point, and presents a particular problem/opportunity, many people will make the same development. The one who is, by chance, first gets the patent and can lock out the others.
I was involved in a case where two team in the same company (of which I was in one) independently made the same invention (later patented) within a two-week period. Looking back, it was because a certain tester, working on both the products concerned, had been making the same complaint. Two teams, presented with the same need, came up with the same solution completely independently.
The rate of development of the IT industry is such that the lifetime of a patent, 15-20 years, is vastly longer than the live-cycle of devices. By the time the patent enters the public domain, it is probably obsolete.
Patents exist to motivate inventors to invent, and then to put the inventions into the public domain after a due period.
Would any of these companies have decided not to develop their phones, and hence do the R&D that led to these patents, if there had been no patent system? I very much doubt it. And the fact that the other companies are, allegedly, infringing means that the first inventor has not been able to keep it secret - or, as is often the case, the idea was "in the air" as a result of the way the industry was developing.
The patent system is severely broken for the IT industry as it now is. For the industry as a whole, it is a zero sum game: no R&D is being done because the developer hopes to profit from license fees. On the contrary, it is a burden because to the time and effort filing patents, the effort of working around other people's patents, and the cost of fighting patent wars or negotiating patent armistices. Of course, interested parties (patent lawyers, including trolls, and the Patent Offices, insist that it is invaluable. But show me an engineer who would not like the whole thing swept away. (I speak only for the IT industry, though I think it apples much more widely).
Except that such small aircraft and airports won't be such a terrorist target.
Why are big aircraft such a terrorist target? Because the results of a successful target are so spectacular: with one bomb, you take out 200+ people; with one plan, you can take out a whole skyscraper. But little regional hoppers simply won't be such a target. If terrorists merely wanted to kill people, almost any major sports event or malls on busy shopping days would do. What terrorists want is our fear, which requires out attention, which requires spectaculars. They don't attack GA airports because the spectacular effect of taking out someone's 4-seater GA plane is near nil.
The current security theatre is a huge victory for the terrorists. Every air traveler in the US is thinking about them and their issues every time they fly. At the first level, they have succeeded spectacularly. At the second level, they haven't a chance: there is no way that this attention is going to have the effect they want. In WWII, both Britain and Germany though that the mass bombing of their cities would bring the other side to their knees. The result was the opposite: it reinforced the fighting spirit. The idea that any conceivable terrorist will do more than make the US angry and more resolute is laughable.
But there is a difference between long life objects such as toothbrushes and keyboards such as keyboards and toothbrushes, which have a life of three months to indefinite, and single-use stuff such as water bottles, food trays, wrapping and padding. If you uses it for at least three months, the cost is spread so thin that I wouldn't worry. Conversely, if it is only used for the 30 minutes from supermarket to home, you should really be using an alternative.
Being the season that it is, one thing I find marginal is children's toys. Once they have been opened, the children seem to be surrounded by a sea of plastic. Nominally they are long life items, but they have so darned many of the things that I bet many of them get only a few minutes of play before being put away, eventually to be dumped.
It looks to me as if he is pretty close to totally blind: no colour perception, and generally a very rough light/dark. From the sound of it, he could see a doorway but not an icon. He certainly seemed to be using the voice system for all his navigation and not looking at the screen, whether he could have or not.
I saw a demo last night by a blind computer user of how he uses the screen reader (on a Mac, but mostly web pages). He had enough vision to be able to see that the projection screen had something on it, not just blue, but once having ascertained that his computer was connected to the screen, he turned his back on it and used only the screen reader. I was surprised how fast he could use the system - in part because of the speed with which his preferred screen reader spoke - a near incomprehensible gabble to me.
The precedent is binding on all courts of the same level, which in this case is the lowest level in the English courts system, but can be overridden by a higher court.
The concept of class action does not exist in English law.
Well, yes. If you could get away with things by simply not responding when sued, the guilty would use that as way of avoiding judgment. Of course, when it comes to court and the plaintiff requests judgment in default, he mist convince the judge that there was a real case to answer - which failed this time, which is why the judge correctly dismissed the claims against those technically in default. You are not guilty without evidence, but if the plaintiff presents reasonable evidence and you do not refute it, the judge has no choice but to accept the plaintiffs case.
The state owned company is only the start. If, as you say, the state is corrupt, this just diverts the loot in a different fashion. Norway and Saudi Arabia work for opposite reasons. In Norway you have a working democracy in one of the least corrupt countries in the world, and one which has a strong sense of social coherence. Norwegians are happy to see the oil wealth as belonging to all Norwegians, because they all see themselves as part of the same "tribe". In Saudi Arabia, you have an absolute monarch in total control. The Saudi Royal family, consisting of a few thousand people, has a total grasp on the oil wealth, And, just as Norwegians are happy to share the wealth with other Norwegians, to sot prices are happy to share the wealth with other princes. Then, collectively, they decide how much wealth to allow to trickle down to the rest of the population, who had better look grateful for whatever they receive, or else.
Possibly tribalism is the most destructive influence in Africa: everybody seems to think that different rules apply to fellow-tribesmen than apply to other tribes. In the West, we have managed largely to get our national boundaries to match our tribal ones - or vice versa. Where this is not true - e.g. former Yugoslavia - problems arise.
Except that you don't have to have "succeeded in doing". You can patent an idea without having to implement it. So, for example, I could patent an orbital cannon even though I don't have the launcher to get it into orbit. In the context, one might patent something which requires a more powerful computer than is yet available, in the hopes that computing power will increase make it possible before the patent expires. Of course, since patent life is at most 20 years, it is wasting your time and money to patent something for which the enabling technology will not be available within that window. The exception is that the USPTO (and possibly others) require a working model for patents purporting to describe perpetual motion machines.
I think there could be trademark issues, IF Apple had already trademarked Steve Jobs image. The executors of Lady Di have apparently trademarked any representation of her and want a cut of any commercial object that uses them as well as a veto on tastelessness. I am not sure that has been tested in court. But it requires Apple to have taken action first, which I am not aware that they have done.
If it is a recognizable logo, it doesn't have to be on something you make. If you put the Olympic rings on anything, the IOC will be after you in nothing flat, even if it is something like, say, a refrigerator that has no sporting use whatsoever.
Apple may say that Jobs appearance is inextricably tied to their brand. Fine, they should have said so in a trademark application before (assuming they haven't).
I agree in part. The problem is not casting blame ("How did we get into this mess?") but finding a cure ("How do we get out of this mess?"). We want the most efficient way to eliminate viruses, both for end-users good and for the good of the net as a whole. Getting ISPs to cut off users is likely to produce a large amount of argument and start the process of disinfecting the users machine with a seriously negative attitude, which will be very counterproductive when dealing with someone who is, by definition, technically unskilled and probably somewhat frightened.
We need to convey to end users that antivirus protection is (a) their problem and (b) easy. And if they get infected, we need them to approach fixing the problem in a co-operative state of mind and treat the ISP (if that is who is helping the disinfection) as a knowledgeable friend not a an enemy who has just attacked you (via the cutoff).
I don't think anything sent over the Net will work, because whatever you do will be copied and subverted by the bad guys. People will recoil because it is expensive and old-fashioned, but I think that the only way to get through to people will be a notification via snail-mail that they are infected and they need to take action. Perhaps, rather than cutting them off, you could increase their rate and use the money to defray the cost of snail mail and to discount antivirus products (just a spur of the moment idea).
You need a different programming model. Our current imperative programming languages inherently assume a single thread, with multi-threading as a huge lump on the side. In a multi-programming model, something like (say) a compiler would code-generate for every function in parallel without ever being asked explicitly to do so. Each function is a stand alone unit, so they can be done in parallel; in an appropriately designed system they would be done in parallel. In GUI programs, updating separate elements of the display would be done independently without needing to ask for it.
But we need a completely different programming paradigm to achieve this. Functional programming might be that paradigm - or it might not. The point of the chip in the original article is to allow researchers to work on this problem. As the article says, the performance of each core in the the chip is very pedestrian. But if researchers can develop software tools that allow the chip to perform at, say, five times the performance of a single core (on a 48 core machine) without programmers having to partition threads explicitly, they will have achieved what the project is about.
I don't think that works in this market place. The choice of smart phone is driven a lot by hype. While/.ers may be technically literate enough to make a reasoned choice, most consumers will be driven by advertising and a few pundits. If you get a reputation foe being the less-good one, it will be very hard to shake off. There will simply not be the initial user base: the iPhone is too sexy and the Android too cheap.
But the Wall Street guys manage (usually) to keep out of crime. They are immoral, not illegal. That is exactly my point: they have worked out how to become rich without breaking the letter of the law. Wherever we set the boundaries of the law, clever people will dance about just on the dry side, while the stupid will be washed away.
You say that it is the "crappy criminals" that get busted. The vast majority of criminals (not terrorists) are stupid. The clever ones have worked out that crime doesn't pay. If you are clever enough to do all the things you say, which avoid you getting caught, you are also clever enough to make as much money legally as you would illegally, and you don't have the risk of prison. I am sure a lot of big business leaders would make great criminals. But why bother. Some criminals of course do succeed in avoiding the law for a long time - every bell curve has its tails. But overwhelmingly, criminals get caught because they are not clever enough.
And this is not coincidental. We buy enough law enforcement to make it not worth while clever people being criminals, while accepting that the stupid will be with us always.
Slashdot Mirror
Insects are arthropods - as are lobsters, shrimps etc. Lobster is not commonly regarded as disgusting and horrible. Can you justify why a land-dwelling arthropod is more disgusting and horrifying than a sea-dwelling one? The insect could very well be a pure vegetarian, whereas many of the sea-dwelling ones we eat are scavengers (e.g. crabs) which flourish on carrion and sewage.
The problem is not the absolute levels, it is the changes. The ecosystem we live in is adapted to whatever lakes etc. output - they have been doing it for millions of years. The problem is the change - we are suddenly adding a whole lot of extra C02 and CH4 into a system that was (moderately) stable. In the long term, there is no problem: in a few hundred thousand years, a new equilibrium will be found and the Earth will trundle happily on. So if you don't mind a few billion human deaths over the next few generations, there is no problem at all. The Earth is in fine condition - it is only seething humanity that has a problem. And the human race is not at risk - billions will not die. So if you are happy to treat humans as we treat cattle (or insects) there is no problem.
The problem is not with /his/ connection, it is with /some link somewhere/ in the internet which has maxed out. He has no idea where it is, nor probably does anyone else including that link's owner. Of course, you expect that to happen, and many internet protocols, particularly including TCP, have sophisticated and well tested mechanisms for throttling back when they detect congestion in their path and slowing their transmissions in a manner which actually works very well at sharing the available bandwidth, But there is a critical phrase in that last sentence: *when they detect congestion*. Large amounts of buffering in the system delays the point at which the sender realizes that packets have been dropped and throttles back. Then a large number of packets get dropped, so the sender scales back a long way to dead slow, and slowly speeds up until it detects packet loss. But, because of buffering, by the time packet loss is detected, it is already sending far faster than the remote choke-point can handle.
By analogy, think of driving a car whose brakes have a one second delay before they go on, and then go to full emergency stop. You would progress in a very stuttery and uncomfortable manner, and on average not very fast. That, he says, is what is increasingly happening to out internet connections. Huge buffers fool senders into thinking that there is lots of bandwidth, and then discard scads of data which has to be retransmitted.
He implies that QoS all the way would alleviate this problem - but that seems incompatible with current pressures for Net Neutrality. At the moment, the end consumer has no access to QoS.
You will have to explain what a "T-test" is. The paper shows apparent precognition, and doesn't look to me like a "simple" test.
From the summary, the implication is that the data analysis was not proper - or at least, not shown to be proper. Since the claimed effect is a fairly small artifact only detectable by sophistcated statistics, it seems reasonable that the reviewers should include those who have a deep understanding of such statistics - which, it is claimed, they did not.
In my experience, some people actually target techies. Some years ago I searched for a deeply technical term, and was surprised to get a porn site near the tp of the screen, I actaully went and looked at the source, and found that the meta-tags were full of technical terms, relating to fibre-optic data transmission etc. The search engines have probably got gaurds against this now, but it shows that spammers are actively looking for techies. It might be that they are seen as relatively affluent sad loners who would buy their alleged products. Whether they put in the corresponding discount for net awareness and higher than average intelligence, I doubt.
As I understand it, if you are being physically threatened, there is no ambiguity: you are allowed to defend yourself until the threat goes away.
I very much agree with your point about escalation, which is why I do not think it would be a good idea to have weapon around. Any intruder is likely to be more of a desperado than you or me and if realistically threatened is likely to escalate much faster and much further.
For the particular threat you mention, if that is becoming a local speciality, how about a set of false keys to give up under threat? They are out of the house and you are on to the phone to the police before they know they are false.
I believe that the police give the benefit of the doubt in most such cases. And remember that for a prosecution to stand against you, a jury would have to find you guilty beyond reasonable doubt (though I can understand the the suffering caused by even a failed prosecution).
T And victims are often prosecuted if they do anything to try to protect themselves
Can you provide evidence to justify this? It is a widespread belief, but the law authorities claim it is not true. In all the cases I have seen, there was pretty good evidence that the accused wend beyond self-defence (legal) to retribution (illegal).
Of course, the belief itself is damaging to society - but I am afraid we have the tabloid press to blame for that.
On the other hand, international comparisons show that the most successful school systems are the ones where teachers are recruited from the high flyers. Finland was given as an example. From the article (in The Economist) it seemed that a really good teacher was far more important than class size, one of the things that people fight for. The conclusion seemed to be to pay, and respect, teachers more so that high flyers see teaching as a worthwhile career, and let class sizes grow if they have to.
Name me /one/ patent that is protecting some companies product.
Yes, I do believe that companies will do as you say they won't. Has Apple dominated the MP2 player, smart phone, and tablet markets because patents stop people building competitive products? No, it has succeeded because it is a better systems and marketing company. Patents don't stop people competing: it is too easy to work around most of them. They add obstacles and add to the cost of doing business, which harms the whole community. But, outside pharmaceuticals, I cannot think of any cases where people embarked or research depending upon the patent system to protect the result.
But in these cases, either the defendants in the cases deliberately infringed by reading the patents, which I strongly doubt, or they copied an obvious feature, in which case secrets are of no value, or the parallel-invented it, just a bit later, which is a common case.
Too many patents, of which one-click is the most notorious, are ideas which become obvious when a certain state of the art is reached. Nobody has the idea before the underlying technology reaches a certain point; once it reaches that point, and presents a particular problem/opportunity, many people will make the same development. The one who is, by chance, first gets the patent and can lock out the others.
I was involved in a case where two team in the same company (of which I was in one) independently made the same invention (later patented) within a two-week period. Looking back, it was because a certain tester, working on both the products concerned, had been making the same complaint. Two teams, presented with the same need, came up with the same solution completely independently.
The rate of development of the IT industry is such that the lifetime of a patent, 15-20 years, is vastly longer than the live-cycle of devices. By the time the patent enters the public domain, it is probably obsolete.
Patents exist to motivate inventors to invent, and then to put the inventions into the public domain after a due period.
Would any of these companies have decided not to develop their phones, and hence do the R&D that led to these patents, if there had been no patent system? I very much doubt it. And the fact that the other companies are, allegedly, infringing means that the first inventor has not been able to keep it secret - or, as is often the case, the idea was "in the air" as a result of the way the industry was developing.
The patent system is severely broken for the IT industry as it now is. For the industry as a whole, it is a zero sum game: no R&D is being done because the developer hopes to profit from license fees. On the contrary, it is a burden because to the time and effort filing patents, the effort of working around other people's patents, and the cost of fighting patent wars or negotiating patent armistices. Of course, interested parties (patent lawyers, including trolls, and the Patent Offices, insist that it is invaluable. But show me an engineer who would not like the whole thing swept away. (I speak only for the IT industry, though I think it apples much more widely).
Except that such small aircraft and airports won't be such a terrorist target.
Why are big aircraft such a terrorist target? Because the results of a successful target are so spectacular: with one bomb, you take out 200+ people; with one plan, you can take out a whole skyscraper. But little regional hoppers simply won't be such a target. If terrorists merely wanted to kill people, almost any major sports event or malls on busy shopping days would do. What terrorists want is our fear, which requires out attention, which requires spectaculars. They don't attack GA airports because the spectacular effect of taking out someone's 4-seater GA plane is near nil.
The current security theatre is a huge victory for the terrorists. Every air traveler in the US is thinking about them and their issues every time they fly. At the first level, they have succeeded spectacularly. At the second level, they haven't a chance: there is no way that this attention is going to have the effect they want. In WWII, both Britain and Germany though that the mass bombing of their cities would bring the other side to their knees. The result was the opposite: it reinforced the fighting spirit. The idea that any conceivable terrorist will do more than make the US angry and more resolute is laughable.
But there is a difference between long life objects such as toothbrushes and keyboards such as keyboards and toothbrushes, which have a life of three months to indefinite, and single-use stuff such as water bottles, food trays, wrapping and padding. If you uses it for at least three months, the cost is spread so thin that I wouldn't worry. Conversely, if it is only used for the 30 minutes from supermarket to home, you should really be using an alternative.
Being the season that it is, one thing I find marginal is children's toys. Once they have been opened, the children seem to be surrounded by a sea of plastic. Nominally they are long life items, but they have so darned many of the things that I bet many of them get only a few minutes of play before being put away, eventually to be dumped.
It looks to me as if he is pretty close to totally blind: no colour perception, and generally a very rough light/dark. From the sound of it, he could see a doorway but not an icon. He certainly seemed to be using the voice system for all his navigation and not looking at the screen, whether he could have or not.
I saw a demo last night by a blind computer user of how he uses the screen reader (on a Mac, but mostly web pages). He had enough vision to be able to see that the projection screen had something on it, not just blue, but once having ascertained that his computer was connected to the screen, he turned his back on it and used only the screen reader. I was surprised how fast he could use the system - in part because of the speed with which his preferred screen reader spoke - a near incomprehensible gabble to me.
The precedent is binding on all courts of the same level, which in this case is the lowest level in the English courts system, but can be overridden by a higher court.
The concept of class action does not exist in English law.
Well, yes. If you could get away with things by simply not responding when sued, the guilty would use that as way of avoiding judgment. Of course, when it comes to court and the plaintiff requests judgment in default, he mist convince the judge that there was a real case to answer - which failed this time, which is why the judge correctly dismissed the claims against those technically in default. You are not guilty without evidence, but if the plaintiff presents reasonable evidence and you do not refute it, the judge has no choice but to accept the plaintiffs case.
The state owned company is only the start. If, as you say, the state is corrupt, this just diverts the loot in a different fashion. Norway and Saudi Arabia work for opposite reasons. In Norway you have a working democracy in one of the least corrupt countries in the world, and one which has a strong sense of social coherence. Norwegians are happy to see the oil wealth as belonging to all Norwegians, because they all see themselves as part of the same "tribe". In Saudi Arabia, you have an absolute monarch in total control. The Saudi Royal family, consisting of a few thousand people, has a total grasp on the oil wealth, And, just as Norwegians are happy to share the wealth with other Norwegians, to sot prices are happy to share the wealth with other princes. Then, collectively, they decide how much wealth to allow to trickle down to the rest of the population, who had better look grateful for whatever they receive, or else.
Possibly tribalism is the most destructive influence in Africa: everybody seems to think that different rules apply to fellow-tribesmen than apply to other tribes. In the West, we have managed largely to get our national boundaries to match our tribal ones - or vice versa. Where this is not true - e.g. former Yugoslavia - problems arise.
Except that you don't have to have "succeeded in doing". You can patent an idea without having to implement it. So, for example, I could patent an orbital cannon even though I don't have the launcher to get it into orbit. In the context, one might patent something which requires a more powerful computer than is yet available, in the hopes that computing power will increase make it possible before the patent expires. Of course, since patent life is at most 20 years, it is wasting your time and money to patent something for which the enabling technology will not be available within that window. The exception is that the USPTO (and possibly others) require a working model for patents purporting to describe perpetual motion machines.
I think there could be trademark issues, IF Apple had already trademarked Steve Jobs image. The executors of Lady Di have apparently trademarked any representation of her and want a cut of any commercial object that uses them as well as a veto on tastelessness. I am not sure that has been tested in court. But it requires Apple to have taken action first, which I am not aware that they have done.
If it is a recognizable logo, it doesn't have to be on something you make. If you put the Olympic rings on anything, the IOC will be after you in nothing flat, even if it is something like, say, a refrigerator that has no sporting use whatsoever.
Apple may say that Jobs appearance is inextricably tied to their brand. Fine, they should have said so in a trademark application before (assuming they haven't).
I agree in part. The problem is not casting blame ("How did we get into this mess?") but finding a cure ("How do we get out of this mess?"). We want the most efficient way to eliminate viruses, both for end-users good and for the good of the net as a whole. Getting ISPs to cut off users is likely to produce a large amount of argument and start the process of disinfecting the users machine with a seriously negative attitude, which will be very counterproductive when dealing with someone who is, by definition, technically unskilled and probably somewhat frightened.
We need to convey to end users that antivirus protection is (a) their problem and (b) easy. And if they get infected, we need them to approach fixing the problem in a co-operative state of mind and treat the ISP (if that is who is helping the disinfection) as a knowledgeable friend not a an enemy who has just attacked you (via the cutoff).
I don't think anything sent over the Net will work, because whatever you do will be copied and subverted by the bad guys. People will recoil because it is expensive and old-fashioned, but I think that the only way to get through to people will be a notification via snail-mail that they are infected and they need to take action. Perhaps, rather than cutting them off, you could increase their rate and use the money to defray the cost of snail mail and to discount antivirus products (just a spur of the moment idea).
You need a different programming model. Our current imperative programming languages inherently assume a single thread, with multi-threading as a huge lump on the side. In a multi-programming model, something like (say) a compiler would code-generate for every function in parallel without ever being asked explicitly to do so. Each function is a stand alone unit, so they can be done in parallel; in an appropriately designed system they would be done in parallel. In GUI programs, updating separate elements of the display would be done independently without needing to ask for it.
But we need a completely different programming paradigm to achieve this. Functional programming might be that paradigm - or it might not. The point of the chip in the original article is to allow researchers to work on this problem. As the article says, the performance of each core in the the chip is very pedestrian. But if researchers can develop software tools that allow the chip to perform at, say, five times the performance of a single core (on a 48 core machine) without programmers having to partition threads explicitly, they will have achieved what the project is about.
I don't think that works in this market place. The choice of smart phone is driven a lot by hype. While /.ers may be technically literate enough to make a reasoned choice, most consumers will be driven by advertising and a few pundits. If you get a reputation foe being the less-good one, it will be very hard to shake off. There will simply not be the initial user base: the iPhone is too sexy and the Android too cheap.
But the Wall Street guys manage (usually) to keep out of crime. They are immoral, not illegal. That is exactly my point: they have worked out how to become rich without breaking the letter of the law. Wherever we set the boundaries of the law, clever people will dance about just on the dry side, while the stupid will be washed away.
You say that it is the "crappy criminals" that get busted. The vast majority of criminals (not terrorists) are stupid. The clever ones have worked out that crime doesn't pay. If you are clever enough to do all the things you say, which avoid you getting caught, you are also clever enough to make as much money legally as you would illegally, and you don't have the risk of prison. I am sure a lot of big business leaders would make great criminals. But why bother. Some criminals of course do succeed in avoiding the law for a long time - every bell curve has its tails. But overwhelmingly, criminals get caught because they are not clever enough.
And this is not coincidental. We buy enough law enforcement to make it not worth while clever people being criminals, while accepting that the stupid will be with us always.