Remember, folks: the CSIRO is fundamentally a research institution, first and foremost. They develop technologies, patent them, and then license the patents out to the manufacturing companies. Income from the patent royalties goes towards further research work.
Unfortunately the patent they won here was for OFDM. Which was developed in the 1960s. Their patent claims were specifically limited to applications above 10GHz, but somehow or another they managed to prevail in court against manufacturers making devices in the 2-6 Ghz range. It's 100% BS.
These guys do understand that nothing prevents me from plugging my laptop into a TV and running a browser on it? And nothing prevents me from plugging a tuner card into my computer and showing TV on the monitor? So regardless of what they do, they can't make something show on a computer but not on a TV?
Wait a minute, my assistant is handing me an envelope he says will explain everything.
After all, would ANY government allow one of their top people to accept an electronic gift without it being checked to make sure it's not bugged? That would be a serious security lapse.
Or they'll just keep it in a non-sensitive area, so all the NSA will learn is the Queen's favorite tea. I seriously doubt it's bugged (too much chance of an international incident if it were discovered, and too little to gain), but you're probably right that UK counterintelligence wouldn't take the chance.
I'm all for boxee, but if they wanted aggregates to link to their content I would think hulu would have provided an API to allow it. Maybe instead of trying to work around every change hulu makes they should work with them instead.
Hulu wants nothing to do with them and would rather they go away. They want to be able to release this stuff, but control it at the same time.
If your country/culture is good at something, you get to name stuff.
That's why stars have Arabic names. I am sorry, but this is just the case with computer science.
Right, with such native English speaking luminaries as Dijkstra, Bauer (ALGOL), Naur (BNF), and Wirth (Pascal), how could Computer Science have gone any other way?
First it was PRS complaining, not that Google was serving up their music without paying, but that Google was refusing to serve their music because the price was too high. Now it's the Guardian insisting, not that Google shouldn't index their content, but that Google should have to pay the Guardian to index it... and apparently not get the option of refusing to index it instead.
Is it something in the water? Has the UK as a whole suddenly forgotten that walking away from a bad deal is a perfectly legitimate thing to do?
What's with the camel and elephant pictures? Humans have been using them as riding beasts and beasts of burden for millennia; that's not really the same as riding a tiger (or lion).
The DA is threatening to file felony charges against three girls for taking pictures of themselves. There's no wiggle room; the guy IS an unreasonable buffoon, and excuses like "context syndrome" don't help.
Sooner or later, someone is going to come up with a better model to get me content I WANT to see without forcing me to wade through shit I've made it clear I don't want to be bothered with.
The problem with that is this model will either require 1) Direct payment from you or 2) You to be a free-rider on a system supported by others or 3) People willing to pay to get you to watch what you want to watch.
1) is tough because nobody wants to pay for TV. 2) is not sustainable. 3) is a pipe dream.
Even after you reach a tipping point it's possible, though it would require extraordinary effort to reverse things.
A "tipping point" in this case would be a point at which positive feedback in the environment would, even if humanity didn't release a single extra molecule of greenhouse gases, cause the Earth to become significantly and permanently warmer. While it is true that this could theoretically be reversed (e.g. through some process which removes massive amounts of greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere, at a rate faster than they are being added due to aforementioned feedback mechanisms), humanity lacks the technology to do so.
Your argument that we should just not worry about it if there is anything we can do to slow things down or reverse them is just irresponsible.
My argument was that IF we had reached a tipping point, there's no point in worrying about it. Since the other half of my argument is that IF we have reached a tipping point, there _isn't_ anything we can do, I didn't make the argument you claim is irresponsible.
The argument that was successfully made, here in Canada, is that the existence of CP tends to legitimize it and leads weak minds to commit heinous acts that they would otherwise never have committed. Therefore society at large is being harmed by the mere existence of CP.
And that sort of "reasoning" is the frictionless surface on the slippery slope to tyranny.
Exactly. The idea behind outlawing obscenity is fairly understandable: we don't want to see things that can hurt us. People are acclimatised to different levels of violence, sexuality and Dane Cook. I for one would suffer tremendously in the presence of the latter item.
There isn't a lot of common ground on the issue either, but the things that jump to mind for me when we talk about obscenity are beastiality, scat, child porn and torture. It'll be similar for most people, give or take a few things. Still, there's a lot left to disagree on.
Torture? So you'd outlaw everything from _Slumdog Millionaire_ to the ST:TNG episode "Chain of Command" to several Edgar Allen Poe stories?
Just because it makes sense to prohibit an action doesn't mean it makes sense to prohibit its fictional depiction.
You should recognize the fallacy in this reasoning. Scientists can't tell me if it's going to rain two weeks from Monday. They can, however, tell me it is going to snow next February.
They can tell you that, but can they be right more often than a simple historical model (i.e. "It's snowed in February in the last 75 out of 100 years") would predict? If not, their predictions aren't worth squat.
In this case denying that humanity is having an impact on the environment, even with a basic knowledge of what's going on seems stupid to me. With the amount of CO2 we're spewing into the atmosphere, at best the question is where's the tipping point and have we reached it (and all evidence points to the fact we have).
Actually, an earlier question would be "is there a tipping point?" With enough negative feedback, there simply isn't one.
Also, if we have already reached a tipping point, there's no point in worrying about it; there's nothing we can do anyway, we're headed to Venus.
He was actually there in the late 60s. I had a textbook that talked about global cooling, and gave possible solutions. Indeed, there is no reason to doubt that eventually we will enter into another ice age.
I was there in the 70s, and I remember Global Cooling as well. The revisionist claims that there was no such panic are part of my reason for being extremely distrustful of the global warming cabal..err, "consensus". Sort of like if 10 years from now, a consensus of historians were to proclaim that the Soviet Union was a myth.
But perhaps it's better to look at climate change as a simple cost problem. Raised CO2 levels might cause higher global temperatures, sea level rise, more often occuring weather extremes, droughts, crop losses etc. And from that: property damage, hunger disasters, armed conflicts and so on. The total of all these effects could be a huge price to pay, if ignored.
Now consider the effects of a cap-and-trade system set at current levels or below. Tyranny (to enforce it), misery, and death.
Possibly because so many agricultural societies lived where it, you know, flooded?
How would the 1993 Mississippi River floods be described by a primitive people without aircraft and long-distance communication? Would it not seem to them that the whole world had flooded?
Sorry but this is pseudo scientific mumbo jumbo. Hieroglyphs have been readable for about 180 years now. No mystery at all. Just google for hieroglyphs or Champollion or Rosetta Stone.
It's all too easy to put lots of thought into making it bloody hard to trace your connection but then link your "anonymous persona" to your "real persona" through common friends, accidently logging into a site using the wrong account for the connection you are using, forgetting to flush cookies (and any similar tracing objects) when moving between your "nonanoymous connection" and your "anonymous connection" and so on.
Yep. Preferably, you want a "sterile" computer for your anonymous activities; it should contain no real information about you (in fact, if you're really paranoid, it would be best if it were purchased anonymously) and should only be used for the anonymous activities, never anything in real life. If you want to keep your anonymous personas separate from each other, you need to go even further.
Personally I don't bother; when I want to be anonymous it's typically just to avoid having my name associated with something on a casual search; I know determined people could figure it out, but I don't care.
Even obama said that 10yrs from now most of the high paying jobs will require at least a 4 yr degree, and even higher paying jobs like in engineering and sciences will requires 4yrs+.
Ten years from now? The first part is true TODAY. As for advanced degrees, I suspect programming and IT are actually some of the few high-paying positions which don't require an advanced degree. Even management often requires an MBA to get ahead. And I'm starting to see more companies actually asking for an MSCS, though that may be a fad.
I'm 37 and have been using computers since I was 8 years old and got my hands on an Atari 400 w/ a membrane keyboard and started teaching myself how to program it. I then moved to Atari 800's, VIC 20's, Commodore 64's, Commodore 128's, Amigas, Apple I, II, and IIc's, Macintoshes and finally to PC's.
If you're going to boast, you could at least make it believable... get the order close to right and leave off the rather improbable Apple I.
Anyway, IMO at 37 we're hardly the "older generation". I'm a second generation computer geek myself.
Sure because it's not like much of the government and private sector are running on IBM software or hardware. Their contracts becoming worthless would not cascade at all.
Neither the software nor the hardware would disappear if IBM went under. They're real assets, with value apart from the company they were made by. Any service contracts might disappear, if no one bought that section of the company, but that's not nearly as catastrophic. In any case, if IBM did fail, it would almost certainly be a Chapter 11 bankruptcy from which it would emerge.
I haven't bought into AIG being "too big to fail" (I'm actually not sure about that one); I've only pointed out that the rationale applied to AIG simply does not apply to IBM.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately the patent they won here was for OFDM. Which was developed in the 1960s. Their patent claims were specifically limited to applications above 10GHz, but somehow or another they managed to prevail in court against manufacturers making devices in the 2-6 Ghz range. It's 100% BS.
These guys do understand that nothing prevents me from plugging my laptop into a TV and running a browser on it? And nothing prevents me from plugging a tuner card into my computer and showing TV on the monitor? So regardless of what they do, they can't make something show on a computer but not on a TV?
Wait a minute, my assistant is handing me an envelope he says will explain everything.
(envelope opening noises)
The note inside says "They're total idiots".
Yep, that does explain everything.
Or they'll just keep it in a non-sensitive area, so all the NSA will learn is the Queen's favorite tea. I seriously doubt it's bugged (too much chance of an international incident if it were discovered, and too little to gain), but you're probably right that UK counterintelligence wouldn't take the chance.
Hulu wants nothing to do with them and would rather they go away. They want to be able to release this stuff, but control it at the same time.
Every day is Internet Jackass Day.
Actually, they did. That's why the Sixteenth Amendment was needed to really let the fun start.
Right, with such native English speaking luminaries as Dijkstra, Bauer (ALGOL), Naur (BNF), and Wirth (Pascal), how could Computer Science have gone any other way?
First it was PRS complaining, not that Google was serving up their music without paying, but that Google was refusing to serve their music because the price was too high. Now it's the Guardian insisting, not that Google shouldn't index their content, but that Google should have to pay the Guardian to index it... and apparently not get the option of refusing to index it instead.
Is it something in the water? Has the UK as a whole suddenly forgotten that walking away from a bad deal is a perfectly legitimate thing to do?
What's with the camel and elephant pictures? Humans have been using them as riding beasts and beasts of burden for millennia; that's not really the same as riding a tiger (or lion).
The DA is threatening to file felony charges against three girls for taking pictures of themselves. There's no wiggle room; the guy IS an unreasonable buffoon, and excuses like "context syndrome" don't help.
The problem with that is this model will either require
1) Direct payment from you
or
2) You to be a free-rider on a system supported by others
or
3) People willing to pay to get you to watch what you want to watch.
1) is tough because nobody wants to pay for TV. 2) is not sustainable. 3) is a pipe dream.
A "tipping point" in this case would be a point at which positive feedback in the environment would, even if humanity didn't release a single extra molecule of greenhouse gases, cause the Earth to become significantly and permanently warmer. While it is true that this could theoretically be reversed (e.g. through some process which removes massive amounts of greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere, at a rate faster than they are being added due to aforementioned feedback mechanisms), humanity lacks the technology to do so.
My argument was that IF we had reached a tipping point, there's no point in worrying about it. Since the other half of my argument is that IF we have reached a tipping point, there _isn't_ anything we can do, I didn't make the argument you claim is irresponsible.
And that sort of "reasoning" is the frictionless surface on the slippery slope to tyranny.
Torture? So you'd outlaw everything from _Slumdog Millionaire_ to the ST:TNG episode "Chain of Command" to several Edgar Allen Poe stories?
Just because it makes sense to prohibit an action doesn't mean it makes sense to prohibit its fictional depiction.
Because it's only the third circle and the immigrants are from four through seven.
They can tell you that, but can they be right more often than a simple historical model (i.e. "It's snowed in February in the last 75 out of 100 years") would predict? If not, their predictions aren't worth squat.
Actually, an earlier question would be "is there a tipping point?" With enough negative feedback, there simply isn't one.
Also, if we have already reached a tipping point, there's no point in worrying about it; there's nothing we can do anyway, we're headed to Venus.
I was there in the 70s, and I remember Global Cooling as well. The revisionist claims that there was no such panic are part of my reason for being extremely distrustful of the global warming cabal..err, "consensus". Sort of like if 10 years from now, a consensus of historians were to proclaim that the Soviet Union was a myth.
Now consider the effects of a cap-and-trade system set at current levels or below. Tyranny (to enforce it), misery, and death.
Possibly because so many agricultural societies lived where it, you know, flooded? How would the 1993 Mississippi River floods be described by a primitive people without aircraft and long-distance communication? Would it not seem to them that the whole world had flooded?
Linear A, however, is another story.
Yep. Preferably, you want a "sterile" computer for your anonymous activities; it should contain no real information about you (in fact, if you're really paranoid, it would be best if it were purchased anonymously) and should only be used for the anonymous activities, never anything in real life. If you want to keep your anonymous personas separate from each other, you need to go even further.
Personally I don't bother; when I want to be anonymous it's typically just to avoid having my name associated with something on a casual search; I know determined people could figure it out, but I don't care.
Ten years from now? The first part is true TODAY. As for advanced degrees, I suspect programming and IT are actually some of the few high-paying positions which don't require an advanced degree. Even management often requires an MBA to get ahead. And I'm starting to see more companies actually asking for an MSCS, though that may be a fad.
If you're going to boast, you could at least make it believable... get the order close to right and leave off the rather improbable Apple I.
Anyway, IMO at 37 we're hardly the "older generation". I'm a second generation computer geek myself.
Neither the software nor the hardware would disappear if IBM went under. They're real assets, with value apart from the company they were made by. Any service contracts might disappear, if no one bought that section of the company, but that's not nearly as catastrophic. In any case, if IBM did fail, it would almost certainly be a Chapter 11 bankruptcy from which it would emerge.
I haven't bought into AIG being "too big to fail" (I'm actually not sure about that one); I've only pointed out that the rationale applied to AIG simply does not apply to IBM.