Technology has made surveillance cheaper. When you need people to watch the cameras and tape to record them is expensive, there is a natural damper on excessive surveillance. When computers watch the cameras for you, Moore's law is cutting the cost of surveillance exponentially. Plus storage is also falling in price, and compression improving. Expect much more of the same unless you protest.
In this case, it is not the product but the advertising that is being objected to. You entertainment with ads free on TV. When you pay to see a film, you expect the fimmaker to tell the story, not sell more goods. It doesn't matter how good or bad the items being advertised are, I don't want my attention distracted from the story the film is telling.
I realize that I am fighting a losing battle here. I have given up TV; maybe I am about to give up films.
Agreed. After 40 years of using computers, I have almost lost the ability to handwrite, I simply very rarely have the need to do more than jot down a few words or, more often, number/character strings (train times, phone numbers etc). My longhand is barely legible to me, and degrades very quickly. After about 20 words, it is illegible. I had to hand-write an envelope yesterday (printer cartridge ran out between letter and second copy of envelope after I inserted envelope in printer wrong). It was hard, took a while, and was ugly though (I hope) functional. (The postcode was certainly legible). I would need to embark on a serious stint of retraining to get back handwriting comprehensible to humans, let alone computers.
You need more than that, as the comments on TFA explain. You need a limitation on space. You need expiry. You need very carefully defined sharing, so sites can federate. You probably need enforcement of https. On the other hand, you need very little storage: rigorously controlled UUIDs seem to me to provide all that is needed i.e. a record of your previous visit to this or a federated site.
TFA makes it clear that it is impossible to repair the current cookie system: it is really badly broken, and several previous attempts have failed.
Could we therefore design a complete new replacement system, to be implemented in parallel, and added as part of the HTML5 standard? If it were well specified, so that all implementations were consistent, and had all the features that TFA shows are needed, it should be both easy to use and have serious benefits for the site designer as well as the user. In which case, designers might be inclined to do if then else
The important thing is that it must be easy to use the replacement (e.g. no inter-browser weirdness) and the designer must get some payoff in terms of a better site. Of course, the user will also get a payoff - probably bigger - in terms of better security amongst other things. But, realistically, it is the designers convenience which will win the day. Once you get the big four (or so) browsers implementing the same standard, and designers regarding that as a preferred option, it has a chance of taking over.
Who can design such a system? Assuming a perfect "supercookie" system is designed, how do we get it into the standard? And what is the game-changing power feature that will bribe site designers to use the supercookie?
There is a grayer area than that. If I rewrite your book, with a paragraph-by-paragraph correspondence, the same plot, the same characters with names and appearances slightly changed, it is still changed. A book callel Earl of the Rings, about a hibbit from the Shaw taking a broach to be destroyed in Mt Gloom would probably be plagiarism (unless it changed enough to become parody).
Entirely agreed. The socially constructive purpose of the stock exchange is for people (investors, fund managers) to make medium term investments in a market in which the can make and liquidate investments easily. As such, their decision times will be many second, or even minutes. In order to maintain market liquidity and to be responsive, it is useful to have speculators willing to trade slightly faster than the real investors, making tiny profits by keeping the market fluid. But they only need to be, say, ten times faster than the "real" investors. A trade every second or two is plenty to allow the market to do its job. And a nano-tax on trades would provide useful damping on a system with natural positive feedback.
There was a news item about two months ago of a senior figure saying that they had finally stopped losing money on the console. Logically, we can deduce that they lost money for three years, and that their margin is still probably very small. Furthermore, that saving is probably over manufacturing and distribution cost, and makes no contribution to marketing costs or recouping development. So it is reasonable to think that are at best breaking even on the console. However, they profit massively from games.
Their business model is to sell the console at a loss or break-even, then make their profits from license fees on the games. If people buy consoles to convert into homebrew computers, but never buy any games, tbey make a loss. the are not particularly worried about people who buy lots of games/and/ use it for homebrew, they are worried about people who buy it for homebrew only.
Thieves wear hoods, motorcycle helmets, stockings... Alarms go off so often that responses are slow, if at all: a burglar can be in and out long before the alarm is responded to,
Since the spray is highly personalized, you can shine an ultra-violet light on a suspect - which they will have difficulty objecting to - and trace them back to a crime for which you may not even have suspected them. If it is the case, as commonly alleged, that the majority of crime is committed by a small number of people, then you may well be able to nab them for crimes for which you have not (yet) suspected them when you question them for a different crime.
That said, I always have my suspicions of such "miracle inventions". It is worth a try - I look forward to seeing how it works out in practice.
We should be including this design in any broadcasts to stars, and on any plaques attached to future deep-space probes. Wouldn't it be a disaster if visiting aliens arrived and we couldn't dock with them?
Where did s/he say "vocational"? The certification could be that you have written an adequate dissertation, produced an adequate Final Year Project etc. Your current degree is just a certification by your professors that you did their course and handed in essays, did research etc. to their satisfaction. The are already moderated by outside bodies. The whole process could be snipped off from a physical university and still function as well, or badly, as it does now.
I entirely agree with your analysis. And I would like to see much, much more done on rehabilitation. And for petty crime, I think that removal doesn't work in that the level of cruelty (long sentences) needed to make it work is, to my mind, disproportionate for the offences. But that is a matter of opinion, not fact.
I was referring to 95% of offences, not 95% of losses. Most white collar crime is, relatively speaking, lucrative. Credit card forgers routinely get away with hundreds of thousands before they are caught; burglars typically get only hundreds, if that, per robbery. On the other hand, the mental distress caused by a burglary is very high (I speak from experience). When you add the people in for drug offences who have not stolen anything (and therefore not added to actuarial losses), violence, drink driving etc, I don't see the figures as inconsistent. One Bernard Madoff (I know, he wasn't here, but the same applies) matches thousands of car thieves, burglars, junkies, muggers etc.
As to absolute statistics: an article about IT in prisons mentioned, in passing, that about 60% of prisoners are functionally illiterate and 40% have mental health problems (obviously, some overlap). And that does not include the merely stupid.
Very relevant point indeed. An argument I often have with the hard-on-crime lot. They propose punishments would deter them - but they are not criminals in the first place. The real criminals are, all too often, stupid and/or ill educated and/or have mental health problems and/or addiction problems. A system tuned to deterring comfortable middle glass good (in law at least) citizens simply doesn't work against the kind of people who commit 95% of crime. But it is those middle-class voters who set the legal agenda.
I don't think they are saying that 3D TV has failed, merely that this is not "The year of 3D TV". Which doesn't surprise me. Leaving aside the format problem, which is serious, the consumer needs to have much more awareness of the products and much more available material in order to put out that amount of money. I think they are not totally stupid - they know that the home TV experience will not match the experience that the got watching big movies - not to mention that while some moves have looked brilliant in 3D, others have less satisfactory. It does not at all surprise me that consumers are playing wait-and-see.
It is actually one branch of what is appearing to be a fork in gaming machines: ultra-high-performance renderers like the PS3, and peripheral driven lower performance systems like the Wii, Some people have sid that the Wii is the way of the future, current generation renderers do all the graphics you need, gaming developments will be in the UI not in graphics. This is a step down the opposite path: we can ans should g3t better graphics.
There is an emulator, under active development, See posts on newsgroup com.sys.transputer.
The 260 megaflops must be for some kind of an array - they were designed to be used in arrays. The individual transputers never clocked faster than 25 MHz, though the FPU on the T800 was relatively fast for the time. Each transputer had four bidirectional links connected to DMA engines wired directly into the hardware scheduler, so that inter-processor communications were very low cost.
I can't see why the architecture made no MMU less of a problem. The architecture was designed with very few registers, which made thread switching (implemented in hardware) a very lightweight operation. It was excellent at multithreading (for which you don't need an MMU) but simply didn't do multiprocessing, full stop.
It was a beautifully engineered device - but the problem space it was engineered for was too small for it to be viable. One of the problems was that the four links only allowed the problem to be mapped in 2-D - if your problem didn't flatten to 2-D, it would go like a dog.
They may not have signed peace treaties, but their constitution requires their Self Defence forces to be used only defensively, and they have major political problems over something as aggressive as providing naval refuelling in the Indian Ocean in support of Afghanistan operations. Japan today really does not want war, whatever they may have done in the past. (Except, of course, the tiny number of far-right loonies that every country suffers from).
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Technology has made surveillance cheaper. When you need people to watch the cameras and tape to record them is expensive, there is a natural damper on excessive surveillance. When computers watch the cameras for you, Moore's law is cutting the cost of surveillance exponentially. Plus storage is also falling in price, and compression improving. Expect much more of the same unless you protest.
In this case, it is not the product but the advertising that is being objected to. You entertainment with ads free on TV. When you pay to see a film, you expect the fimmaker to tell the story, not sell more goods. It doesn't matter how good or bad the items being advertised are, I don't want my attention distracted from the story the film is telling.
I realize that I am fighting a losing battle here. I have given up TV; maybe I am about to give up films.
Agreed. After 40 years of using computers, I have almost lost the ability to handwrite, I simply very rarely have the need to do more than jot down a few words or, more often, number/character strings (train times, phone numbers etc). My longhand is barely legible to me, and degrades very quickly. After about 20 words, it is illegible. I had to hand-write an envelope yesterday (printer cartridge ran out between letter and second copy of envelope after I inserted envelope in printer wrong). It was hard, took a while, and was ugly though (I hope) functional. (The postcode was certainly legible). I would need to embark on a serious stint of retraining to get back handwriting comprehensible to humans, let alone computers.
You need more than that, as the comments on TFA explain. You need a limitation on space. You need expiry. You need very carefully defined sharing, so sites can federate. You probably need enforcement of https. On the other hand, you need very little storage: rigorously controlled UUIDs seem to me to provide all that is needed i.e. a record of your previous visit to this or a federated site.
TFA makes it clear that it is impossible to repair the current cookie system: it is really badly broken, and several previous attempts have failed.
Could we therefore design a complete new replacement system, to be implemented in parallel, and added as part of the HTML5 standard? If it were well specified, so that all implementations were consistent, and had all the features that TFA shows are needed, it should be both easy to use and have serious benefits for the site designer as well as the user. In which case, designers might be inclined to do
if then else
The important thing is that it must be easy to use the replacement (e.g. no inter-browser weirdness) and the designer must get some payoff in terms of a better site. Of course, the user will also get a payoff - probably bigger - in terms of better security amongst other things. But, realistically, it is the designers convenience which will win the day. Once you get the big four (or so) browsers implementing the same standard, and designers regarding that as a preferred option, it has a chance of taking over.
Who can design such a system? Assuming a perfect "supercookie" system is designed, how do we get it into the standard? And what is the game-changing power feature that will bribe site designers to use the supercookie?
There is a grayer area than that. If I rewrite your book, with a paragraph-by-paragraph correspondence, the same plot, the same characters with names and appearances slightly changed, it is still changed. A book callel Earl of the Rings, about a hibbit from the Shaw taking a broach to be destroyed in Mt Gloom would probably be plagiarism (unless it changed enough to become parody).
Entirely agreed. The socially constructive purpose of the stock exchange is for people (investors, fund managers) to make medium term investments in a market in which the can make and liquidate investments easily. As such, their decision times will be many second, or even minutes. In order to maintain market liquidity and to be responsive, it is useful to have speculators willing to trade slightly faster than the real investors, making tiny profits by keeping the market fluid. But they only need to be, say, ten times faster than the "real" investors. A trade every second or two is plenty to allow the market to do its job. And a nano-tax on trades would provide useful damping on a system with natural positive feedback.
There was a news item about two months ago of a senior figure saying that they had finally stopped losing money on the console. Logically, we can deduce that they lost money for three years, and that their margin is still probably very small. Furthermore, that saving is probably over manufacturing and distribution cost, and makes no contribution to marketing costs or recouping development. So it is reasonable to think that are at best breaking even on the console. However, they profit massively from games.
Their business model is to sell the console at a loss or break-even, then make their profits from license fees on the games. If people buy consoles to convert into homebrew computers, but never buy any games, tbey make a loss. the are not particularly worried about people who buy lots of games /and/ use it for homebrew, they are worried about people who buy it for homebrew only.
No, what they should do is get a magic wand, wave it, and magic all those criminal genes out of people. And they all lived happily ever after.
Thieves wear hoods, motorcycle helmets, stockings... Alarms go off so often that responses are slow, if at all: a burglar can be in and out long before the alarm is responded to,
Since the spray is highly personalized, you can shine an ultra-violet light on a suspect - which they will have difficulty objecting to - and trace them back to a crime for which you may not even have suspected them. If it is the case, as commonly alleged, that the majority of crime is committed by a small number of people, then you may well be able to nab them for crimes for which you have not (yet) suspected them when you question them for a different crime.
That said, I always have my suspicions of such "miracle inventions". It is worth a try - I look forward to seeing how it works out in practice.
We should be including this design in any broadcasts to stars, and on any plaques attached to future deep-space probes. Wouldn't it be a disaster if visiting aliens arrived and we couldn't dock with them?
Vendors of education i.e. university-like entities. Not necessarily vendors of software/hardware etc.
Where did s/he say "vocational"? The certification could be that you have written an adequate dissertation, produced an adequate Final Year Project etc. Your current degree is just a certification by your professors that you did their course and handed in essays, did research etc. to their satisfaction. The are already moderated by outside bodies. The whole process could be snipped off from a physical university and still function as well, or badly, as it does now.
I entirely agree with your analysis. And I would like to see much, much more done on rehabilitation. And for petty crime, I think that removal doesn't work in that the level of cruelty (long sentences) needed to make it work is, to my mind, disproportionate for the offences. But that is a matter of opinion, not fact.
I was referring to 95% of offences, not 95% of losses. Most white collar crime is, relatively speaking, lucrative. Credit card forgers routinely get away with hundreds of thousands before they are caught; burglars typically get only hundreds, if that, per robbery. On the other hand, the mental distress caused by a burglary is very high (I speak from experience). When you add the people in for drug offences who have not stolen anything (and therefore not added to actuarial losses), violence, drink driving etc, I don't see the figures as inconsistent. One Bernard Madoff (I know, he wasn't here, but the same applies) matches thousands of car thieves, burglars, junkies, muggers etc.
As to absolute statistics: an article about IT in prisons mentioned, in passing, that about 60% of prisoners are functionally illiterate and 40% have mental health problems (obviously, some overlap). And that does not include the merely stupid.
Very relevant point indeed. An argument I often have with the hard-on-crime lot. They propose punishments would deter them - but they are not criminals in the first place. The real criminals are, all too often, stupid and/or ill educated and/or have mental health problems and/or addiction problems. A system tuned to deterring comfortable middle glass good (in law at least) citizens simply doesn't work against the kind of people who commit 95% of crime. But it is those middle-class voters who set the legal agenda.
I don't think they are saying that 3D TV has failed, merely that this is not "The year of 3D TV". Which doesn't surprise me. Leaving aside the format problem, which is serious, the consumer needs to have much more awareness of the products and much more available material in order to put out that amount of money. I think they are not totally stupid - they know that the home TV experience will not match the experience that the got watching big movies - not to mention that while some moves have looked brilliant in 3D, others have less satisfactory. It does not at all surprise me that consumers are playing wait-and-see.
I wonder if they think all 3-D systems are the same, and that the glasses they took home from Avatar will work on their new TV.
Plus, of course, some of the technologies are glasses-free; I don't know if any of these have reached the market yet.
So I cannot patent a nuclear power station, because it will take years to build, by which time my ideas will be in the public domain.
Nor can I patent an idea which has a part missing, so that I will inspire someone else to invent the missing part (and share in my gains).
It is actually one branch of what is appearing to be a fork in gaming machines: ultra-high-performance renderers like the PS3, and peripheral driven lower performance systems like the Wii, Some people have sid that the Wii is the way of the future, current generation renderers do all the graphics you need, gaming developments will be in the UI not in graphics. This is a step down the opposite path: we can ans should g3t better graphics.
There is an emulator, under active development, See posts on newsgroup com.sys.transputer.
The 260 megaflops must be for some kind of an array - they were designed to be used in arrays. The individual transputers never clocked faster than 25 MHz, though the FPU on the T800 was relatively fast for the time. Each transputer had four bidirectional links connected to DMA engines wired directly into the hardware scheduler, so that inter-processor communications were very low cost.
I can't see why the architecture made no MMU less of a problem. The architecture was designed with very few registers, which made thread switching (implemented in hardware) a very lightweight operation. It was excellent at multithreading (for which you don't need an MMU) but simply didn't do multiprocessing, full stop.
It was a beautifully engineered device - but the problem space it was engineered for was too small for it to be viable. One of the problems was that the four links only allowed the problem to be mapped in 2-D - if your problem didn't flatten to 2-D, it would go like a dog.
They originated it, not copied it.
They should be installed right behind the President, because the sun shines out of his...
They may not have signed peace treaties, but their constitution requires their Self Defence forces to be used only defensively, and they have major political problems over something as aggressive as providing naval refuelling in the Indian Ocean in support of Afghanistan operations. Japan today really does not want war, whatever they may have done in the past. (Except, of course, the tiny number of far-right loonies that every country suffers from).