I think I know where you're going with this argument, but no one has ever jumped so many homeless people on a skateboard. It's reckless of you to ask—it's impossible...no, I won't do it!
Agreed? It does affect you. You buy one Apple device, you're stuck with Apple whether you "agreed" to it or not. The consequences mean that you should make sure you're ok with it before you drink the Kool-Aid.
Yea, these robots need some rules about how they interact with humans, particularly if they could harm a human. I wonder if anyone has already done some work on that...
Yes, considering the average demographic reading/., I don't think it's wise to preemptively rule any girl out. That is, unless you're in the minority around here that has already gotten rich off your great idea.
I wouldn't care one whit if students studied together or posted their problems asking for help. These are not the kids to fail. The ones that deserve to fail are the ones that don't even look at the problems, don't care how to solve them, and don't seek out the information needed to do so.
It is one thing to pass off someone else's work as your own. I have a problem with out-and-out plagiarism. On the other hand, I have no problem with a student that openly cites a source, even if the quotation from that source constitutes the whole of the assignment. Why? Because if that is a possible response to the assignment I've given, the problem is clearly with the assignment and not with the student.
So how would my class run? Simple—your final grade has two components: 75% test scores and 25% demonstrated originality of thought. 75% of your score, therefore, comes from proctored exams in the context of an environment where rules are enforced that require you to demonstrate the knowledge is actually yours. The rest of your score comes from your homework, and is assessed based upon the originality of your work. If you choose to seek out and cite other sources, as long as you disclose them, then great, you've done the assignment but perhaps scored no points (unless the selection and presentation of citations themselves show relevant originality).
We must not forget that the role of the school is to provide access to knowledge to students that want it. The rules should be constructed around favoring and assisting those that fall into this category, not around punishing those that fall outside it.
Does it allow people to watch TV that they didn't pay for? Yes
Agreed on this one...
Does it prevent Verizon and MobiTV from receiving revenue that they should from the streams? Yes
Um. No, it does not prevent them from receiving revenue from the streams. All they have to do is what everyone else does...don't make it available for public consumption if you don't want to.
Is it wrong? Yes
By "it" I assume you mean people viewing the publicly available streams (as opposed to MobiTV making the stream publicly available...which is also not wrong, IMHO, if that's what they want to do let 'em do it). It is not wrong to visit a URL on the Intar-webz. It is never wrong to view content that is publicly available. Why would it be? (I suppose you could make an argument against child pornography...but even there you'd have a tough argument if I'm your opponent.)
Look, in this case MobiTV made a mistake. Someone discovered the mistake and publicized that MobiTV is inadvertently giving their content away for free. The solution here is not to shoot the messenger a cease-and-desist letter, but to fix the mistake. No harm done.
Does MobiTV and Verizon have the right to send a cease and desist letter? Sure
Sure. They have a right to send whatever they want short of letter bombs. Should the site hosting the link respond, though? No, certainly not. Linking to publicly available URLs is what the Internet's all about. We can't allow a precedent to be established that allows some company to guilelessly dump all their content into public view and then sue me for linking it on my blog. That's stupid.
See folks, whether its a hack or not doesn't change the fact that its just wrong. There are too many people freeloading nowadays. The Internet makes it so much easier to freeload. And its becoming a disease. When MobiTV fixes their stuff, I'm sure a bunch of people in these forums will yell and scream about it, but few of them will actually starting paying for the service that they started to enjoy. I do agree though that MobiTV should be ashamed of themselves for leaving their service wide open.
It must be nice in the consequence-free universe you live in. In the real world, if you make a mistake, even if you didn't intend to, there are often consequences. In this case the consequences are minor, perhaps even beneficial to MobiTV as you point out (companies often do give free trial periods to hook people—that's all this amounts to). When you refer to "freeloading" I imagine you're picturing sites like TPB. But even in that case you'd have a tough argument to make—TPB doesn't actually host any content. All they are is a directory to services hosted on people's PCs that wish to exchange information. And there are good reasons to protect the free exchange of information, even if there are illegal or unethical uses for it...much like freedom of speech, which is also about the free exchange of information without outside intervention.
Arguments like yours fail to take into account the reality of the situation. There are times when what is right and what is good and what is ethical is not enforceable in any meaningful way. In these cases, it is almost always because the either the context in which the event is occurring or the worldview in which is it perceived is fundamentally flawed. In this case, I believe the context is not flawed—the Internet is designed to link from one place to another, and technology allows prevention of linking, so there's no issue with the context of this event. That leaves only your worldview on this one.
Normally, in any system concerned with locking something down, there is no module that simply reports an "authorized" status. It is far more likely that the proper function of this chip depends directly upon the particular configuration of switches achieved by the cryptographically strong exchange of information with the patent owner. In other words, if the patent owner hands back the right info, the chip configures those gates in a particular fashion, and all other operation of the chip depends upon that particular configuration. Furthermore, the configuration could be done such that proper operation in the rest of the chip is effectively a one-way hash condition. That is, even if you understand the behavior you're trying to achieve in the rest of the chip and are permitted many trials to observe if that behavior occurs, it's still very, very difficult to infer the proper configuration from repeated trials, observation of results, and comparison of expected results.
Either that, or: the guys that came up with this thing are extremely stupid and I just divulged an awesome, patentable idea in a public forum.
Yes, this is correct. Moore's law has nothing to do with price. In other words, if price doubled each time transistor density did, nothing would be different today.
Wellllll...except that the average laptop would cost several trillion dollars. Minor detail.
Assembly is what the computer runs. If you don't know the fundamentals of how a machine works, how can you claim to be a developer?
I'm troubled by the tendency of most computer science programs in the US moving away from assembly as a requirement. I'm also troubled by the awful job most universities do teaching object-oriented programming and design, and the complete and total lack of architecture and tools skills required at the college level. When I graduated, it was a rude shock to discover on my first job as a software developer that very little of what we do is write code—it's nearly the shortest part of the development process. I was also not happy to find out that, at the higher levels, very little attention is paid to languages and most successful projects focus on good design that can be implemented in any language.
In all fairness, I like Google and freedom and all that good stuff, but they messed up safe search. It shouldn't be a user settable option, the safe Google search engine should be at a different URL. Like safe.google.com or something like that. This way, if I'm a parent I can whitelist safe.google.com and ban www.google.com at my router. Kids still get google and all the wonders of the Internet and I get to exercise soul-crushing control over every aspect of their lives. (Not that I would, as a parent, do this...but we must recognize that there are irrational people out there that believe it's a good idea to shield their kids from having to deal with the world in the hopes that, at some point in the future, thrusting them into said world with a complete lack of practice, understanding, and context will allow them to flourish. And these irrational people will make life difficult for us all unless we may it easy for them to corrupt their children by pervasively imposing limits on every aspect of their existence.)
Wikipedia could do the same thing too—it wouldn't be hard to create, say, a couple or three categories of safety and then create subdomains like safe1.wikipedia.org and safe2.wikipedia.org that only allow browsing of that safety level (inclusive of safer levels, obviously). Same as before, parents block wikipedia.org and whitelist the safety level they're comfortable with. Best of all, with this approach specific content can be targeted at different levels of safety. Say I view an article on xtina piercing, for example. The helpful image might be listed as "unsafe" whereas the text describing the topic might be at safety level 5. Viewing that article via www.wikipedia.org would show the whole deal. Viewing at safe5.wikipedia.org would show the text and a placeholder for the image. Viewing that article via safe4.wikipedia.org would show a placeholder for the entire article: "This content is unsafe for viewing at safety level 4." Or vice versa—maybe if I'm browsing an article on an organization called "Kill the Purple Beast", the text of the article exceeds my safety level but the image of Barney is just fine for display, so that's all I see. Then at least I know the "purple beast" they're referring to is Barney, and I've gotten some value from the experience.
Wait...the post you're responding to doesn't really make a point that's relevant to TFA. TFA is about ISPs throttling bandwidth to customers, not servers throttling bandwidth to a particular endpoint. These are totally different things.
If I'm hosting a server and I throttle the number of requests I'll respond to from a particular IP, (IP range, etc), that's just part of how my app is working. If the end user is paying me for a particular service then these kinds of terms are determined by that agreement and have nothing to do with the ISP that customer happens to be using. If there is no contract between me as the app provider and the customer, then I can throttle away. Just like Google could take down its main search page tomorrow and everyone that doesn't have a specific contract with Google for search services would be SOL (like me, and likely you).
On the other hand, as a consumer if I'm hitting the web and paying my ISP to deliver on their promises and they're not meeting the terms of their own contract...that sucks and I shouldn't have to pay for it. I'm tired of these connections being advertised as maximum speeds. I don't care about a potential maximum rate of 6.0Mbps if I'm only ever able to actually get 1.5Mbps burst and 768Kbps sustained. These ISPs should be forced to advertise minimum guaranteed rates. Forcing them to compete on that number would be beneficial to consumers, especially if the law allowed consumers to hold them to their promises and required them to provide consumers an easy way to monitor their speed to hold the ISP accountable.
After a cursory glance thru TFA, it sounds like light waves are just interfering in a way that prevents the lagging, faster wave from propagating past the slower, leading wave. Can any physics people out there explain how this could possibly be interpreted as "we created a black hole in a lab environment"?
Re:So when do we get its successor?
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You don't install ANY OS on hardware without considering driver support.
You're right about that. Most people don't install any OS on hardware period. They buy the computer with Windows pre-installed, as I presume the grandparent poster did. There is simply no other explanation for his comment, as anyone that's ever tried to install any OS on any system knows what you say here is true.
No, I saw the sarcasm tags.:-) My post was directed at the unbelievable run of posts against the idea. I was particularly surprised by the guy that said, "Oh yea, that's just what the internet needs, a single place to sign on!" Duh.
The sad thing is, the forces at work are more likely to implement this and get it at least partially working despite all the complications than a similar technology that is concerned with protecting user identity and users' privileged information. I suspect it's because the music industry that is so pro-DRM when it comes to protecting their own content would be perfectly happy to leave our information completely in the clear so it would be avialable to them for marketing purposes.
This is logically flawed. Just because there are some people who believe it's ok to use force doesn't mean that every pro-liberty individual is guaranteed to lose everything. Liberty-infringing security measures are not the only way to combat such people. And there aren't enough such people willing to take others' things by force to "guarantee" everyone will eventually lose everything.
I have to say I'm shocked there are so many people piling on this anti-identity bandwagon. Don't you people understand that the purpose of OpenID is to allow you, the user, to control your own identity and the information companies are allowed to collect about you? (As opposed to right now, where sites ask you to sign up and provide X info to create an account and you either provide it or don't get on?)
Identity management allows you to control your Internet presence in one single place, and acts as a single gateway for you to allow or disallow sites to know about you and collect information about you. This is a good thing people. It's secure. It promotes security...real security. It also promotes anonymity when you want it. Unlike Facebook where you add 50 apps and leave all the boxes checked and then have to page through one app by one once you understand the impact of those boxes...
Don't knock something till you understand it. Someday the intarwebz will be open id powered.
From TFA it sounds more like an evolutionary algorithm than anything to do with swarms. It said the word swarm over and over but didn't actually describe anything to do with them...instead it talked about how to solve the traveling salesman problem.
But my point is beyond what you're saying. If your aim is to enter the information and never retrieve it again, or limit yourself to a particular limited form of retrieval for the rest of time, great. But for the amount of work you're doing by loading Excel and knowing Excel and dealing with Excel, shouldn't your expectations be higher? Computers are supposed to be work multipliers— if I spend as long putting an address into my computer as I used to, writing it in an address book, shouldn't I get more bang for the buck? Or is this machine just a $1500 address book when used for that purpose, but at its core no better than a real address book?
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Who decided the standard amount of light output by a certain wattage? Cuz whoever it was was apparently wrong.
I think I know where you're going with this argument, but no one has ever jumped so many homeless people on a skateboard. It's reckless of you to ask—it's impossible...no, I won't do it!
So...does your response above mean that you think Apple is as open as it should be?
You guys are all missing the major point here, though...who knew the center of Jupiter was made of buckyballs?!
Agreed? It does affect you. You buy one Apple device, you're stuck with Apple whether you "agreed" to it or not. The consequences mean that you should make sure you're ok with it before you drink the Kool-Aid.
Yea, these robots need some rules about how they interact with humans, particularly if they could harm a human. I wonder if anyone has already done some work on that...
Yes, considering the average demographic reading /., I don't think it's wise to preemptively rule any girl out. That is, unless you're in the minority around here that has already gotten rich off your great idea.
So.......your sig. What's that about?
I suspect that the "configuration of gates" they refer to in TFA is basically an electronically configured dongle.
Your viewpoint on this is messed up.
I wouldn't care one whit if students studied together or posted their problems asking for help. These are not the kids to fail. The ones that deserve to fail are the ones that don't even look at the problems, don't care how to solve them, and don't seek out the information needed to do so.
It is one thing to pass off someone else's work as your own. I have a problem with out-and-out plagiarism. On the other hand, I have no problem with a student that openly cites a source, even if the quotation from that source constitutes the whole of the assignment. Why? Because if that is a possible response to the assignment I've given, the problem is clearly with the assignment and not with the student.
So how would my class run? Simple—your final grade has two components: 75% test scores and 25% demonstrated originality of thought. 75% of your score, therefore, comes from proctored exams in the context of an environment where rules are enforced that require you to demonstrate the knowledge is actually yours. The rest of your score comes from your homework, and is assessed based upon the originality of your work. If you choose to seek out and cite other sources, as long as you disclose them, then great, you've done the assignment but perhaps scored no points (unless the selection and presentation of citations themselves show relevant originality).
We must not forget that the role of the school is to provide access to knowledge to students that want it. The rules should be constructed around favoring and assisting those that fall into this category, not around punishing those that fall outside it.
"Not really"? How about "no"?
Agreed on this one...
Um. No, it does not prevent them from receiving revenue from the streams. All they have to do is what everyone else does...don't make it available for public consumption if you don't want to.
By "it" I assume you mean people viewing the publicly available streams (as opposed to MobiTV making the stream publicly available...which is also not wrong, IMHO, if that's what they want to do let 'em do it). It is not wrong to visit a URL on the Intar-webz. It is never wrong to view content that is publicly available. Why would it be? (I suppose you could make an argument against child pornography...but even there you'd have a tough argument if I'm your opponent.)
Look, in this case MobiTV made a mistake. Someone discovered the mistake and publicized that MobiTV is inadvertently giving their content away for free. The solution here is not to shoot the messenger a cease-and-desist letter, but to fix the mistake. No harm done.
Sure. They have a right to send whatever they want short of letter bombs. Should the site hosting the link respond, though? No, certainly not. Linking to publicly available URLs is what the Internet's all about. We can't allow a precedent to be established that allows some company to guilelessly dump all their content into public view and then sue me for linking it on my blog. That's stupid.
It must be nice in the consequence-free universe you live in. In the real world, if you make a mistake, even if you didn't intend to, there are often consequences. In this case the consequences are minor, perhaps even beneficial to MobiTV as you point out (companies often do give free trial periods to hook people—that's all this amounts to). When you refer to "freeloading" I imagine you're picturing sites like TPB. But even in that case you'd have a tough argument to make—TPB doesn't actually host any content. All they are is a directory to services hosted on people's PCs that wish to exchange information. And there are good reasons to protect the free exchange of information, even if there are illegal or unethical uses for it...much like freedom of speech, which is also about the free exchange of information without outside intervention.
Arguments like yours fail to take into account the reality of the situation. There are times when what is right and what is good and what is ethical is not enforceable in any meaningful way. In these cases, it is almost always because the either the context in which the event is occurring or the worldview in which is it perceived is fundamentally flawed. In this case, I believe the context is not flawed—the Internet is designed to link from one place to another, and technology allows prevention of linking, so there's no issue with the context of this event. That leaves only your worldview on this one.
Normally, in any system concerned with locking something down, there is no module that simply reports an "authorized" status. It is far more likely that the proper function of this chip depends directly upon the particular configuration of switches achieved by the cryptographically strong exchange of information with the patent owner. In other words, if the patent owner hands back the right info, the chip configures those gates in a particular fashion, and all other operation of the chip depends upon that particular configuration. Furthermore, the configuration could be done such that proper operation in the rest of the chip is effectively a one-way hash condition. That is, even if you understand the behavior you're trying to achieve in the rest of the chip and are permitted many trials to observe if that behavior occurs, it's still very, very difficult to infer the proper configuration from repeated trials, observation of results, and comparison of expected results.
Either that, or: the guys that came up with this thing are extremely stupid and I just divulged an awesome, patentable idea in a public forum.
Yes, this is correct. Moore's law has nothing to do with price. In other words, if price doubled each time transistor density did, nothing would be different today.
Wellllll...except that the average laptop would cost several trillion dollars. Minor detail.
Assembly is what the computer runs. If you don't know the fundamentals of how a machine works, how can you claim to be a developer?
I'm troubled by the tendency of most computer science programs in the US moving away from assembly as a requirement. I'm also troubled by the awful job most universities do teaching object-oriented programming and design, and the complete and total lack of architecture and tools skills required at the college level. When I graduated, it was a rude shock to discover on my first job as a software developer that very little of what we do is write code—it's nearly the shortest part of the development process. I was also not happy to find out that, at the higher levels, very little attention is paid to languages and most successful projects focus on good design that can be implemented in any language.
In all fairness, I like Google and freedom and all that good stuff, but they messed up safe search. It shouldn't be a user settable option, the safe Google search engine should be at a different URL. Like safe.google.com or something like that. This way, if I'm a parent I can whitelist safe.google.com and ban www.google.com at my router. Kids still get google and all the wonders of the Internet and I get to exercise soul-crushing control over every aspect of their lives. (Not that I would, as a parent, do this...but we must recognize that there are irrational people out there that believe it's a good idea to shield their kids from having to deal with the world in the hopes that, at some point in the future, thrusting them into said world with a complete lack of practice, understanding, and context will allow them to flourish. And these irrational people will make life difficult for us all unless we may it easy for them to corrupt their children by pervasively imposing limits on every aspect of their existence.)
Wikipedia could do the same thing too—it wouldn't be hard to create, say, a couple or three categories of safety and then create subdomains like safe1.wikipedia.org and safe2.wikipedia.org that only allow browsing of that safety level (inclusive of safer levels, obviously). Same as before, parents block wikipedia.org and whitelist the safety level they're comfortable with. Best of all, with this approach specific content can be targeted at different levels of safety. Say I view an article on xtina piercing, for example. The helpful image might be listed as "unsafe" whereas the text describing the topic might be at safety level 5. Viewing that article via www.wikipedia.org would show the whole deal. Viewing at safe5.wikipedia.org would show the text and a placeholder for the image. Viewing that article via safe4.wikipedia.org would show a placeholder for the entire article: "This content is unsafe for viewing at safety level 4." Or vice versa—maybe if I'm browsing an article on an organization called "Kill the Purple Beast", the text of the article exceeds my safety level but the image of Barney is just fine for display, so that's all I see. Then at least I know the "purple beast" they're referring to is Barney, and I've gotten some value from the experience.
Wait...the post you're responding to doesn't really make a point that's relevant to TFA. TFA is about ISPs throttling bandwidth to customers, not servers throttling bandwidth to a particular endpoint. These are totally different things.
If I'm hosting a server and I throttle the number of requests I'll respond to from a particular IP, (IP range, etc), that's just part of how my app is working. If the end user is paying me for a particular service then these kinds of terms are determined by that agreement and have nothing to do with the ISP that customer happens to be using. If there is no contract between me as the app provider and the customer, then I can throttle away. Just like Google could take down its main search page tomorrow and everyone that doesn't have a specific contract with Google for search services would be SOL (like me, and likely you).
On the other hand, as a consumer if I'm hitting the web and paying my ISP to deliver on their promises and they're not meeting the terms of their own contract...that sucks and I shouldn't have to pay for it. I'm tired of these connections being advertised as maximum speeds. I don't care about a potential maximum rate of 6.0Mbps if I'm only ever able to actually get 1.5Mbps burst and 768Kbps sustained. These ISPs should be forced to advertise minimum guaranteed rates. Forcing them to compete on that number would be beneficial to consumers, especially if the law allowed consumers to hold them to their promises and required them to provide consumers an easy way to monitor their speed to hold the ISP accountable.
After a cursory glance thru TFA, it sounds like light waves are just interfering in a way that prevents the lagging, faster wave from propagating past the slower, leading wave. Can any physics people out there explain how this could possibly be interpreted as "we created a black hole in a lab environment"?
No, I saw the sarcasm tags. :-) My post was directed at the unbelievable run of posts against the idea. I was particularly surprised by the guy that said, "Oh yea, that's just what the internet needs, a single place to sign on!" Duh.
The sad thing is, the forces at work are more likely to implement this and get it at least partially working despite all the complications than a similar technology that is concerned with protecting user identity and users' privileged information. I suspect it's because the music industry that is so pro-DRM when it comes to protecting their own content would be perfectly happy to leave our information completely in the clear so it would be avialable to them for marketing purposes.
This is logically flawed. Just because there are some people who believe it's ok to use force doesn't mean that every pro-liberty individual is guaranteed to lose everything. Liberty-infringing security measures are not the only way to combat such people. And there aren't enough such people willing to take others' things by force to "guarantee" everyone will eventually lose everything.
I myself am often given to hyperbole, but jeez.
I have to say I'm shocked there are so many people piling on this anti-identity bandwagon. Don't you people understand that the purpose of OpenID is to allow you, the user, to control your own identity and the information companies are allowed to collect about you? (As opposed to right now, where sites ask you to sign up and provide X info to create an account and you either provide it or don't get on?)
Identity management allows you to control your Internet presence in one single place, and acts as a single gateway for you to allow or disallow sites to know about you and collect information about you. This is a good thing people. It's secure. It promotes security...real security. It also promotes anonymity when you want it. Unlike Facebook where you add 50 apps and leave all the boxes checked and then have to page through one app by one once you understand the impact of those boxes...
Don't knock something till you understand it. Someday the intarwebz will be open id powered.
From TFA it sounds more like an evolutionary algorithm than anything to do with swarms. It said the word swarm over and over but didn't actually describe anything to do with them...instead it talked about how to solve the traveling salesman problem.
Did you mean apocalyptic or apocryphal?
But my point is beyond what you're saying. If your aim is to enter the information and never retrieve it again, or limit yourself to a particular limited form of retrieval for the rest of time, great. But for the amount of work you're doing by loading Excel and knowing Excel and dealing with Excel, shouldn't your expectations be higher? Computers are supposed to be work multipliers— if I spend as long putting an address into my computer as I used to, writing it in an address book, shouldn't I get more bang for the buck? Or is this machine just a $1500 address book when used for that purpose, but at its core no better than a real address book?