This reminds me of when some fast food restaurants started not having drink sizes of small, medium, and large. Instead, they went with medium, large, and extra-large. Yet, no matter what they call them, what they are hasn't changed.
From now on, I think instead of flying economy, I'll fly "narrow seat, no meal".
The mafia is smart enough to outsmart this, street gangs are smart enough, terrorists are smart enough. This is to watch the civilian population like you and me.
Are you implying that you and him aren't smart enough to develop your own encryption scheme?
I'm not completely sure about the slashdot demographics but I think more than three quarters of the readers are capable of searching an algorithm and implementing it in less than a day in a way that wouldn't leave beckdoors for the government.
Or they'll just download a trusted system with open source which doesn't already have back doors, probably from a place like Canada which (currently) doesn't classify encryption as munitions, and can therefore produce and distribute them with impunity. Encryption, like many things, is a cat that is very hard to put back in the bag.
Maybe you should have also looked at the cost of the things your were trying to prevent in your proposals, too, because they also scale. 5 minutes a day looking for unlabeled things piled at the bottom of a cabinet * 1000 stores * 365 days per year * 2 years is how much? Hmm, about $300k (assuming a $5/hr wage). It looks like your proposal was poorly done.
In a bigger picture, things are rarely done 'just because they should be'. Usually there's a cost involved in not doing it, or profit-making organizations wouldn't be doing them. What's a real grind is working for those companies that refuse to see the cost of not doing it, because they see cash as something not inherently linked to risks or people's time. These are the people with no disaster recovery plan because that's a lot of money and the odds of a disaster affecting them are so small.
I don't think the price point is bad. In a couple years, Moore's Law will bring it in line. I was this close to getting one, when I found an alternative at 0 cost - a decent reader for my blackberry (mobipocket) and a free tool for my computer to manage and convert ebooks into a format the reader likes. So, for the cost of $150, I can get a bigger, nicer screen, longer battery life, and some better features. I might still do it one day, because it's really painful scrolling after every paragraph, but the price point is hard to beat. As for ebooks, if I can't keep them forever, read them on whatever, and convert them to whatever, I don't buy them. I have over 200 last time I checked, and there are 10 or 15 for reading on my blackberry right now. And I only buy hardcopy now if I can't meet those criteria in ebook format.
Judging nuclear reactors based on our experiences at Chernobyl is about as reasonable as judging cars based on the Ford Pinto. This idea needs to be chuckled out of existence. Nuclear, like any concentrated energy source, is dangerous. And given how concentrated it is, it's much more dangerous than gasoline, more dangerous than high explosives. But this doesn't mean we can't work with it, just that we need some careful engineering before we do.
Besides the "gee-whiz" factor, why is time being spent on this sort of research? Will any flapping-wing aircraft ever be as efficient as a modern jumbo-jet for transporting large loads of cargo and people? I'm no aerospace engineer, and I'm not saying that a jet is the model of efficiency, but I don't see how a flappy wing mode of transport would be better.
People like you make me happy that I don't have to get the permission of some overarching governing body before I try something new. I would not call myself artistically inclined, but I'm quite willing to acknowledge that not everything has to have a simple survival or economic purpose.
A good mathematician will tell you that any segment greater than n is an infinite amount of overlapping segments of length n. For practical purposes, given this is digital data, sampled at 44.1kHz, any sample is 44,100 times the difference between the length of the clip and the length required to be classified as infringing. This should make the mere $750 per infringement a moot point.
I expect this will be part of RIAA's response in this case.
a few weeks after you buy a 'smartphone' some other model makes yours a POS. well, almost. how can anyone buy in that kind of market and retain sanity?
Easy, don't try to buy "the latest and greatest" - buy what works for you. I have a blackberry. The screen is alright, not touch, and not as big as I'd like for reading books on. I like the pearl ball more than the toggle wheel I last experienced on my corporate-paid phone. The software is reasonably good, although it doesn't have all the games I like. I really like the full qwerty keyboard, and how bb auto-adds punctuation and capitalization. My gmail account is forwarded to the phone, and used on my home computer, which works great for me. New cells have features I look forward to at some point - larger screens, different cursor controls, better html support, and faster data transfer rates. But I'm not a fan of touch screens on phones, so that's not a win for me. But I'm not pining for those because I'm not bound to the latest and greatest, I already have something that works acceptably for me.
Yes, there's the ultimate limit you mention there, and even if you could capture all that energy from a laser, it still won't be enough to generate a useful amount of acceleration. Definitely a useful proposal for a space elevator crawler, where you don't have to fight the force of gravity at the same time. I haven't done the numbers, but I can imagine a time where a small electric engine of some kind can generate enough thrust from a small number of high-powered lasers being used to supply power to get a small payload into orbit. Continuous acceleration can do pretty amazing things.
There are a number of reasons why rail guns are more attractive than a "steady boost". First, we don't have anything that gives a steady boost for any reasonable amount of time at a reasonable amount of force. Rockets just don't last very long in the overall scheme of things, and laser-based propulsion systems don't have enough force to launch any appreciable payload (yet). Second, rail guns don't require you to accelerate fuel in order to keep on accelerating. This puts an effective limit on rockets, and anything the rail gun adds pushes out our capacity based on the fuel limit. Third, the higher/faster you're going before you start using conventional rockets will reduce fuel requirements, increase payload, or increase orbit. This is somewhat related to the second item, but not entirely. Conventional rockets require you to bring your fuel with you, which reduces payload capacity, and this compounds with the effects of being deeper in the gravity well.
Property ownership is different in different countries. What you describe is effectively true in Canada. If someone wants to build a mall and you don't want to sell, the government will force you to sell if they think the mall is a good idea. Also, most people don't have mineral rights to land in Canada. This is not the case in the US, at least not from what I've heard. It's possible there are differences between states.
I can only assume that your opinion of her former employee is based on hopeless optimism, which I can appreciate. Of course, I don't think even generally good companies are interested in the prospect of negative publicity when the potential benefit is so small. I hear that is important for companies where public perception is king.
I think his response wasn't so much about the actions of her former employer, but the caution potential future employers might exercise when considering her for employment.
Libel falls clearly against the euphemism for describing rights stated as "Your right to swing your fists stops at the end of my nose." You don't have a right to say something against someone else when it is demonstrably false, not done in a clear satire manner, and possibly causes them harm of one kind or another. In other words, libel is the exercising of your rights which causes a breach of someone else's rights, and is therefore not defensible as a freedom. The other two are different in nature, given that another person's rights are not being violated by committing them, but are rather national security issues.
Yes, but the odds of it affecting a million people are vanishingly small, and the odds of it affecting me are even smaller. If I have any sleepless nights, it won't be because of these asteroids.
Maybe it's just me and my Hollywood-colored upbringing, but whenever I hear a black-suit-type say something is secured, I expect to see bodies with rather large holes cooling nearby...Hmm, where's that list of spam and botnet admins?
Those are valid points, but I'm not just thinking of electronics. As it is, speakers and microphones can be made waterproof, even if they can be easily punctured. But I still hate that the warranty is voided on my cell phone because I had it in my pants pocket on a rainy day.
If they're expensive, why not replace conventional RAM first? The board architecture will change, but the CPU architecture and overall system would remain largely the same (read from block, write to block, do computation on block). It would be a similar transition as we had from SD-RAM to DDR-RAM. You'd immediately get the benefits of a system that can go into standby mode without having to keep feeding power, and would get these chips into a place where there is still high value per byte (as compared to most other things). Next stage is a HDD with a SATA, USB, Firewire, or whatever interface, and again, the computer only sees a drive with somewhat different capacities than are normally used. The controller takes care of the interfacing, and life goes on, while we get the benefits of potentially faster reads (hopefully at something comparable to RAM if we're talking about replacing RAM with this stuff, too), no moving parts, and therefore lower power consumption. We do lose the benefits of a unified memory space, but we have a smoother transition. The final stage is what we'd all like to see, where things look a lot like a C64, just REALLY fast. Coupled with the option of additional drives, and we replace all the flash drives with something a little better, too.
I'm not against bloat that has some use, which includes the user experience. But I should be able to get that functionality without all the bloat, which some linux versions allow. I also shouldn't have to put up with crappy bloat and cruft because someone decided to link DRM (which shouldn't even be there) with network speed in such a way that viewing any media causes my effective network connection to drop to 1% of theoretical.
The big point with waterproof items is if you pierce the membrane, you have another potential entry point for water. Unless you have a major inefficiency problem with inductive charging, you're better off without the holes.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of when some fast food restaurants started not having drink sizes of small, medium, and large. Instead, they went with medium, large, and extra-large. Yet, no matter what they call them, what they are hasn't changed.
From now on, I think instead of flying economy, I'll fly "narrow seat, no meal".
The mafia is smart enough to outsmart this, street gangs are smart enough, terrorists are smart enough. This is to watch the civilian population like you and me.
Are you implying that you and him aren't smart enough to develop your own encryption scheme?
I'm not completely sure about the slashdot demographics but I think more than three quarters of the readers are capable of searching an algorithm and implementing it in less than a day in a way that wouldn't leave beckdoors for the government.
Or they'll just download a trusted system with open source which doesn't already have back doors, probably from a place like Canada which (currently) doesn't classify encryption as munitions, and can therefore produce and distribute them with impunity.
Encryption, like many things, is a cat that is very hard to put back in the bag.
Maybe you should have also looked at the cost of the things your were trying to prevent in your proposals, too, because they also scale. 5 minutes a day looking for unlabeled things piled at the bottom of a cabinet * 1000 stores * 365 days per year * 2 years is how much? Hmm, about $300k (assuming a $5/hr wage). It looks like your proposal was poorly done.
In a bigger picture, things are rarely done 'just because they should be'. Usually there's a cost involved in not doing it, or profit-making organizations wouldn't be doing them. What's a real grind is working for those companies that refuse to see the cost of not doing it, because they see cash as something not inherently linked to risks or people's time. These are the people with no disaster recovery plan because that's a lot of money and the odds of a disaster affecting them are so small.
I don't think the price point is bad. In a couple years, Moore's Law will bring it in line. I was this close to getting one, when I found an alternative at 0 cost - a decent reader for my blackberry (mobipocket) and a free tool for my computer to manage and convert ebooks into a format the reader likes. So, for the cost of $150, I can get a bigger, nicer screen, longer battery life, and some better features. I might still do it one day, because it's really painful scrolling after every paragraph, but the price point is hard to beat.
As for ebooks, if I can't keep them forever, read them on whatever, and convert them to whatever, I don't buy them. I have over 200 last time I checked, and there are 10 or 15 for reading on my blackberry right now. And I only buy hardcopy now if I can't meet those criteria in ebook format.
Re:Sound? SoundExchange? Why do I find it easy to believe those two companies serve a similar purpose?
Judging nuclear reactors based on our experiences at Chernobyl is about as reasonable as judging cars based on the Ford Pinto. This idea needs to be chuckled out of existence.
Nuclear, like any concentrated energy source, is dangerous. And given how concentrated it is, it's much more dangerous than gasoline, more dangerous than high explosives. But this doesn't mean we can't work with it, just that we need some careful engineering before we do.
Besides the "gee-whiz" factor, why is time being spent on this sort of research? Will any flapping-wing aircraft ever be as efficient as a modern jumbo-jet for transporting large loads of cargo and people? I'm no aerospace engineer, and I'm not saying that a jet is the model of efficiency, but I don't see how a flappy wing mode of transport would be better.
People like you make me happy that I don't have to get the permission of some overarching governing body before I try something new. I would not call myself artistically inclined, but I'm quite willing to acknowledge that not everything has to have a simple survival or economic purpose.
A good mathematician will tell you that any segment greater than n is an infinite amount of overlapping segments of length n. For practical purposes, given this is digital data, sampled at 44.1kHz, any sample is 44,100 times the difference between the length of the clip and the length required to be classified as infringing. This should make the mere $750 per infringement a moot point.
I expect this will be part of RIAA's response in this case.
a few weeks after you buy a 'smartphone' some other model makes yours a POS. well, almost. how can anyone buy in that kind of market and retain sanity?
Easy, don't try to buy "the latest and greatest" - buy what works for you. I have a blackberry. The screen is alright, not touch, and not as big as I'd like for reading books on. I like the pearl ball more than the toggle wheel I last experienced on my corporate-paid phone. The software is reasonably good, although it doesn't have all the games I like. I really like the full qwerty keyboard, and how bb auto-adds punctuation and capitalization. My gmail account is forwarded to the phone, and used on my home computer, which works great for me.
New cells have features I look forward to at some point - larger screens, different cursor controls, better html support, and faster data transfer rates. But I'm not a fan of touch screens on phones, so that's not a win for me. But I'm not pining for those because I'm not bound to the latest and greatest, I already have something that works acceptably for me.
Yes, there's the ultimate limit you mention there, and even if you could capture all that energy from a laser, it still won't be enough to generate a useful amount of acceleration. Definitely a useful proposal for a space elevator crawler, where you don't have to fight the force of gravity at the same time.
I haven't done the numbers, but I can imagine a time where a small electric engine of some kind can generate enough thrust from a small number of high-powered lasers being used to supply power to get a small payload into orbit. Continuous acceleration can do pretty amazing things.
There are a number of reasons why rail guns are more attractive than a "steady boost".
First, we don't have anything that gives a steady boost for any reasonable amount of time at a reasonable amount of force. Rockets just don't last very long in the overall scheme of things, and laser-based propulsion systems don't have enough force to launch any appreciable payload (yet).
Second, rail guns don't require you to accelerate fuel in order to keep on accelerating. This puts an effective limit on rockets, and anything the rail gun adds pushes out our capacity based on the fuel limit.
Third, the higher/faster you're going before you start using conventional rockets will reduce fuel requirements, increase payload, or increase orbit. This is somewhat related to the second item, but not entirely. Conventional rockets require you to bring your fuel with you, which reduces payload capacity, and this compounds with the effects of being deeper in the gravity well.
Property ownership is different in different countries. What you describe is effectively true in Canada. If someone wants to build a mall and you don't want to sell, the government will force you to sell if they think the mall is a good idea. Also, most people don't have mineral rights to land in Canada.
This is not the case in the US, at least not from what I've heard. It's possible there are differences between states.
I agree entirely, and I think she should be commended for taking a stand, but I don't think it will improve her chances of getting a new job.
Or a quirky geeky word: Ba-Zynga!
I can only assume that your opinion of her former employee is based on hopeless optimism, which I can appreciate. Of course, I don't think even generally good companies are interested in the prospect of negative publicity when the potential benefit is so small. I hear that is important for companies where public perception is king.
I think his response wasn't so much about the actions of her former employer, but the caution potential future employers might exercise when considering her for employment.
Don't underestimate the value of something that works properly that 0.1% of the time when it really needs to.
Libel falls clearly against the euphemism for describing rights stated as "Your right to swing your fists stops at the end of my nose." You don't have a right to say something against someone else when it is demonstrably false, not done in a clear satire manner, and possibly causes them harm of one kind or another. In other words, libel is the exercising of your rights which causes a breach of someone else's rights, and is therefore not defensible as a freedom.
The other two are different in nature, given that another person's rights are not being violated by committing them, but are rather national security issues.
Yes, but the odds of it affecting a million people are vanishingly small, and the odds of it affecting me are even smaller. If I have any sleepless nights, it won't be because of these asteroids.
Maybe it's just me and my Hollywood-colored upbringing, but whenever I hear a black-suit-type say something is secured, I expect to see bodies with rather large holes cooling nearby...Hmm, where's that list of spam and botnet admins?
Those are valid points, but I'm not just thinking of electronics. As it is, speakers and microphones can be made waterproof, even if they can be easily punctured. But I still hate that the warranty is voided on my cell phone because I had it in my pants pocket on a rainy day.
Windows Vista. I believe they fixed that little bug in a service pack. Here's the Slashdot article.
If they're expensive, why not replace conventional RAM first? The board architecture will change, but the CPU architecture and overall system would remain largely the same (read from block, write to block, do computation on block). It would be a similar transition as we had from SD-RAM to DDR-RAM. You'd immediately get the benefits of a system that can go into standby mode without having to keep feeding power, and would get these chips into a place where there is still high value per byte (as compared to most other things).
Next stage is a HDD with a SATA, USB, Firewire, or whatever interface, and again, the computer only sees a drive with somewhat different capacities than are normally used. The controller takes care of the interfacing, and life goes on, while we get the benefits of potentially faster reads (hopefully at something comparable to RAM if we're talking about replacing RAM with this stuff, too), no moving parts, and therefore lower power consumption. We do lose the benefits of a unified memory space, but we have a smoother transition.
The final stage is what we'd all like to see, where things look a lot like a C64, just REALLY fast. Coupled with the option of additional drives, and we replace all the flash drives with something a little better, too.
I'm not against bloat that has some use, which includes the user experience. But I should be able to get that functionality without all the bloat, which some linux versions allow. I also shouldn't have to put up with crappy bloat and cruft because someone decided to link DRM (which shouldn't even be there) with network speed in such a way that viewing any media causes my effective network connection to drop to 1% of theoretical.
And no, that is not a made-up scenario.
The big point with waterproof items is if you pierce the membrane, you have another potential entry point for water. Unless you have a major inefficiency problem with inductive charging, you're better off without the holes.