Actually, it is much more likely that a CLA will be found to be unenforcable than the text of a well-established software license. In fact, CLAs requiring copyright assignment are probably void in large parts of the world, meaning you are back to square one.
Well, no country enforces IP like the US does anyway, so it really matters most whether they're enforceable in the US. When was the last time you heard of Germany handing down a billion-dollar judgment over a couple of defines?
The FSFe's FLA purports to solve this very problem. It also is designed to revert all rights to the original author if the licensee attempts to relicense the code under a proprietary license. I'm certainly not a German lawyer but it seems reasonably likely to be accepted by countries that uphold author's rights because not only does the copyright remain with the author, but the agreement actually is designed to protect their philosophical choice in licensing their code under a free software license.
He was using a video recording device (i.e. wearing it with the camera pointed at the screen) in a cinema. All cinemas I've been to forbid that kind of thing for obvious reasons. I don't think he was "wrongly harassed and detained".
That's only true if you accept that it is OK to ban pointing a recording device at a movie screen and not actually recording anything. I wouldn't be surprised if the law actually bans the possession of a recording device in a theater, which is something EVERYBODY breaks. Heck, there is a policy at my workplace that says that no employee may possess a camera that isn't registered with security. Back in the early 2000s (after everybody already had cell phone cameras) they even posted a sign by the gates stating that cell phone cameras are banned and should be turned into security. Even the corporate-issued cell phones were in violation of the policy. Yet, it remained policy all the same.
People with the power to make laws enjoy making laws that make no sense. They're always overly broad in their scope, that way they can use discretionary enforcement. The company clearly doesn't want to fire all of its employees, but if they even suspect that an employee is taking photos of documents or whatever they can just search them on the way out the door and sure enough they'll have a reason to fire them.
In this case Glass was also the guy's prescription glasses. Does he need to carry two sets of glasses now?
And who would use Glass to pirate a movie in the first place? I doubt the video quality is all that great, and it is attached to a head that is constantly bobbing around. Plus they are worn in plain sight. Anybody who wants to pirate a movie will just bring in a concealed camera and mount it to a stable surface, or more likely still just collaborate with the theater owner. The whole idea of distributing a movie to thousands of theaters and then trying to keep it off of the internet is crazy to begin with - all it takes is one recording, and if they happen to get 2 they can even strip out the watermarking by comparing frames.
The Linux kernel not getting relicensed under a newer form of the GPL is a feature, not a bug.
Yeah, explain that to me in 10 years when some court rules that contributions under the GPL are illegal to distribute due to some legal deficiency in the license. Suddenly there is no linux kernel, because there is no way to switch to a newer license that does not have that attribute.
Sure, that might never happen, just as a firmware burned into a ROM might never need upgrading. However, if it does you're up the creek. The whole GPL2+ thing is about having an insurance policy.
Well, when you get down to that level it is a bit less deterministic than your illustration makes it sound like. The ribosome doesn't try out one tRNA after another per-se - it just makes it really easy for a peptide bond to form if the codon matches well. There is some rate at which incorrect amino acids are added (well, a rate for every combination of tRNA and mRNA sequence/position), and a much higher rate at which correct ones are added. Incorrect and correct amino acids can also be removed, and I imagine the rate of the former is high and the rate of the latter is low. All of this ends up resulting in peptides being formed correctly.
When you get down to the atomic level it is all probabilities and kinetics, even in computer chips. There is some probability that a 1 stored in a RAM chip will get read as a 0, but the circuitry operates at a scale/speed/etc where that probability is very low. Biological systems tend not to use quite the same level of "digitization" and so mistakes are much more common, but then again when a cell cranks out a protein it doesn't just crank out one, so if on occasion one has a defect it is usually no big deal.
Kind of depends how you define "execute." DNA contains control structures, and coding regions. It gets copied, and then used as a blueprint for making proteins (ribosomes are the "CPU" for this and are basically a combination of proteins and RNA). Then the proteins themselves do things.
RNA is an interesting sub-example, because it can be functional as well as a blueprint at the same time. Many think that life started out with RNA as a result, and the ribosome is found in all living organisms and is dependent on RNA for its operation. Even in humans the RNA is basically just a copy of some piece of DNA.
Now, just how often DNA is "executed" is another matter. When you talk about chemicals binding to it the "clock speeds" could be seen as being very fast, as these chemicals are constantly binding and unbinding all the time. When you talk about the process of copying DNA or making proteins out of it, the speed isn't all that fast. Google suggests that the rate is about 500 bases per minute. A base contains 2 bits worth of information, so that is 16bps. DNA replication is about 60x faster. However, biological processes are highly parallelized - at any time a cell might be transcribing hundreds of genes, and especially in bacteria there might be many copies of the same gene being created in parallel at once, and many proteins being made at once off of each copy. When a eukaryote replicates its DNA it copies it from numerous points at once. And then of course an animal is made of billions of cells on top of that.
So, compared to a modern CPU many information-processing functions in the cell are incredibly slow. However, they're also incredibly parallel and asynchronous.
If you expand the definition of 'code' to VHDL and other hardware design languages, there must be 'code' doing far more than a graphics chip would.
Another intermediate state would be DSPs. These historically have run at very high clock speeds for their time, but they perform a very simple set of tasks. GPUs are another example - those run at fairly high clock speeds, and are usually highly parallel.
That's the whole thing about "due process." The courts simply argue that as long as the process is followed it is kosher. The process might be to waterboard you and then run you through a meat grinder, but hey, the constitution says "due process" so it must be kosher. Well, that is if you didn't eat pork in the previous 72 hours...
Oh, I agree completely. The difference is that with paper currency only somebody like the Federal Government could be bothered to track serial numbers. Considering that the US Government already photos the exterior of every letter that is mailed it seems like logging something that actually has a serial number would be child's play (google Mail Isolation Control and Tracking).
With Bitcoin anybody could easily track serial numbers, because a lot more about transactions is published, and everything is already accessible in a structured manner.
The funny thing was that I showed a picture of this to a diabetic friend and told them that it measured blood sugar through the eye. They literally shrieked in horror thinking that it meant that it would be stabbing them in the eye.
I don't have diabetes but I am fairly close to somebody who does have diabetes. Having a continuous log of sugar levels is something that is VERY useful in treating the condition. Sure, just having an alert would certainly be useful, not but really sufficient.
One issue I see with contacts is that they can't really be left in 24x7 without increased risk of complications. Of course, many people do just this all the same. Blood sugars dropping during sleep is definitely a scenario that you'd want your sensor to cover. Having an audible alarm would probably be a good idea - I'm not sure if a flashing light would be sufficient to wake somebody (though it would be inside your eyelids - I honestly have no idea how well that works for waking people).
Of course, what diabetics really need is a closed-loop system that both continuously measures sugar levels and administers insulin. It seems like we're rather close to making that work - the main issue is that we don't really have reliable real-time continuous monitoring via sensors. Most sensor technologies have considerable latencies - you're getting a measurement of what your sugars were 15 minutes ago. That is good enough to sound an alarm before a trend becomes dangerous, but not really good enough for a feedback loop.
Fair enough. Maybe I've just never seen a car as something I'd want to sink 15% of my income into, but then I wasn't into the fashion of getting my ARM adjusted by the government either...
If the entire body has less energy than the energy needed to break whatever type of bond is holding its atoms together, there is zero probability in classical physics of any atom breaking free, as even in the unlikely scenario that the energy of the entire system ended up in one atom, it wouldn't be enough. This would still be above absolute zero.
I'll agree with you on that one. Of course, that is still limited to classical mechanics, and storing the kg prototype at fraction of a degree above absolute zero has a whole different set of problems, which was my original point.
If you had something like a 1% chance per century of losing an atom, on a time scale of a century your expected sublimation would be zero, although on a time scale of a billion years it would be different.
No, over the period of a century your expected rate of sublimation would be somewhere between zero and the weight of an atom. You can't just turn small numbers into zero simply because they're small. Well, I guess it works if you are into credit default swaps.
In any case, at the temperatures that would make the sublimation rate anywhere near that low there would be a bunch of other practical problems with the maintenance of the kg prototype.
My point was that when you're talking about measurements at the level of precision required just about any effect of physics becomes relevant. Ok, so you drop the temperature to.0000001K. Then in the year 20,000 after you've finished cooling it down enough, then how do you weigh it without warming it back up or having the temperature cause other problems? Oh, and how do you keep random molecules of gas from diffusing into your storage vessel and instantly condensing onto the surface (and warming it up considerably in the process)?
Perhaps you should read the whole post before replying. Both things you mention fall under this exception:
"(B) The equipment is designed, operated, and configured in a manner that prevents the driver of the motor vehicle from viewing the television broadcast or video signal while operating the vehicle in a safe and reasonable manner."
Perhaps you should read the whole post before replying. The exceptions only pertain to equipment that is "installed in a vehicle." A phone in either your pocket or a passenger's hands is not "installed in a vehicle."
Also, neither is designed in a manner that prevents the driver from viewing a broadcast. It might be operated in that way, but the law requires it to be "designed, operated, AND configured" to prevent such use.
But, as far as I read the law none of the exceptions apply to anything that isn't bolted down.
Sadly you need a bunch of lawyers to write a lawyer-proof definition and the Bill of Rights is very far from that.
I submit that it is impossible to create any law that has a lawyer-proof definition. People have brains and can adapt - anything written once on paper cannot. It will always come down to the decisions made by those in positions of power, like judges. As soon as every judge says "I'm not going to approve this forfeiture action" the whole system goes away, at least until the executive branch says "I'm not going to bother asking a court for permission." Then the system just gets exposed for what it already is...
I do agree with you, but I've also seen examples of the opposite situation happening at work. When you don't put the financial factors into the decision making, then there is never a reason to say "go." If the engineer gets fired when the ship blows up, and they get paid to work on the ship more when the launch is canceled, then the incentive is for the engineer to perpetually say that the ship needs more work. If you need 75 engineers to agree on the launch decision, then it will NEVER launch.
So, companies are used to overriding engineer decisions because that's the only way they can stay in business. The problem here was that they went too far. The problem is that since the guys in charge aren't engineers, they can't tell when too far is too far. If you look at the recordings/transcripts/etc of the Challenger launch decision it is pretty obvious that they went too far, but it obviously wasn't apparent to those making the decisions.
That's the problem with quality decisions - how do you decide when quality is "good enough" given that there will ALWAYS be some risk of failure? And what happens to the companies that make the "right" decision? Do they then go out of business when they're undercut by a company willing to make the "wrong" decision?
At work we have people in QA roles who have no incentive to ever say yes to anything. It results in a lot of quality-on-paper type activities that really add little value and a great deal of cost, and it often comes at the expense of things that would actually improve quality. The typical example of this is bugs that get left unfixed because the cost of the process to fix them is greater than the cost of just living with the bug, even if it is obvious to anybody with technical knowledge that just changing one line of code would eliminate a problem that bugs every user every day.
This kind of "safety no matter how many people die" logic is why airline pilots get automatic alerts and conflict resolution before crashing into another airliner, but not before crashing into some plane built back into the 60s. If you stuck about $100 worth of hardware in the small plane then both planes would benefit from the improved situational awareness, but the problem is that due to safety regulations the $100 worth of hardware costs $15k to install, and so the small plane isn't equipped with it. Thus the safety regulations make everybody less safe.
The HUD is specifically built and engineered to assist the pilot, and nothing else. Finally, unless it's a fighter jet, the HUD doesn't swallow the entire pilot's field-of-view. HUD gear is certified by the FAA before use on a given model/type of aircraft.
Notice that Google Glass on some douchebag's face while driving his/her car is the polar fucking opposite of all these things.:/
As has been passed along in many an aviation list this week there is one thing that Google Glass would be capable of legally telling any passenger in an aircraft - that the aircraft is landing 10 miles away from the intended destination. It is, of course, illegal for a pilot to use it.
And yes, I realize that the navigation equipment in the cockpit was also capable of indicating this fact. Indeed, most likely the airport in front of them was identified on the MFD.
As stated by others, there are laws against monitors while driving on a public road.
The law in question bans the use of a smartphone by a passenger in the front seat. Read it. Any monitor of any kind forward of the rear of the driver's seat is banned. Presumably you can put the super bowl on in the back seat if you watch it through the rear view mirror though.
The most important consideration about driving: driving on public roads is a privilege, not a right.
I'd like you to find that in the Constitution somewhere. I'll raise you the 9th amendment. Just because cars didn't exist in the 1700s doesn't mean that people are less free to operate them than colonialists were to operate horses.
But hey, the Constitution doesn't say anything about reading every text message sent by anybody on the planet either, so...
A person shall not drive a motor vehicle if a television receiver, a video monitor, or a television or video screen, or any other similar means of visually displaying a television broadcast or video signal that produces entertainment or business applications, is operating and is located in the motor vehicle at a point forward of the back of the driver’s seat
The rest of the sentence has an "or" in it, so simply violating this bit of the law is sufficient to be a crime.
From my reading of this, a smartphone inside your pocket would be illegal if not powered off. It is capable of displaying entertainment or business applications, it is operating, and it is located forward of the back of the driver's seat.
I guess it depends on the definition of "operating" - if it only means that TV is being displayed, then it would be illegal for somebody in the front passenger seat to operate a smart phone.
The law is ridiculous. Of course, so are half the laws on the books and that doesn't stop them from being enforced...
Who is this "Bitcoin community" who decided that the bitcoins were stolen? And why should I trust that group of people? After all, if they decide that those Bitcoins are stolen, how can I be sure that they won't mark my Bitcoins as stolen should I ever do something they don't like (whatever that may be)?
Well, it really boils down to freedom of speech - those bitcoins are forever traceable back to this operation. Anybody can choose to accept them in a trade or refuse to accept them in a trade. If the perception is that there are many out there who would not accept them, then their value is likely to be reduced, as even those willing to accept them in a trade probably would prefer not to since they could be higher to sell.
And yes, it probably does reduce the value of Bitcoin on the whole, but there isn't anything that anybody can do about that. This isn't an anonymous currency.
Has Ulbricht actually been found - in a court of law - to be either, or confessed to being so? Not so far as I've heard.
This is an asset forfeiture case. He isn't being tried or punished. His assets are being tried in a court of law, and the constitution doesn't give any human rights to assets, so they aren't entitled to such novelties as "trial by jury" or "innocent until proven guilty" or the "right to confront witnesses." Don't worry though, every time a stack of money was asked to speak up if they had any concerns with the proceedings it went along in silent acquiescence.
In drug cases the first thing the US Government typically does is seize any assets they can find and use forfeiture to confiscate them with only an administrative procedure. The owner of the assets has no standing in the court to speak or prevent this - he is technically not under trial.
Of course, when the accused is finally under trial he'll have a much harder time of it now that he has no assets with which to pay a lawyer. Oh, and if he is found to be innocent it doesn't change the fact that his assets were already found to be guilty. Apparently you can try to sue to get your money back, but you need to prove the innocence of the assets in question.
And yes, if this sounds absolutely insane, that merely demonstrates that you aren't.
No, the key word is effective, as in you scale it to the needs of the system. You can adjust what is "cold enough" such that the probability of it subliming on the time scale of centuries is zero. It will still sublime on some longer timescale. You can work out that classically, around 7 K there would be is likely not a single atom in the whole kilogram prototype with enough energy to escape the surface.
So, which is it? "Zero" probability, or "likely" not a single atom. They are NOT the same thing. You can lower the sublimation rate to an arbitrarily low level via classical physics, but you can never make it zero.
You obviously missed my point by removing details from the quote. The upper middle class car that I'm talking about is the vehicle that Tesla is claiming will be to market in approximately 3 years and will be in the $35k range. Tesla was founded in 2003, 5 years later, the Roadster came out, 8 years after that, they're aiming to have an upper middle class price point.
I did miss that, but doesn't really change my point. $35k cars are owned by the wealthy, not the upper-middle-class. How is somebody making somewhat over $50k/yr household income going to buy a $35k car?
I do get that over time their products will become more affordable.
I had attended a training session several years ago at REI, a company that produces counter surveillance equipment. Aside from strongly pushing their products, the classes were extremely informative and demonstrated techniques to detect just these sorts of things.
This is a cat and mouse came - I'm sure somebody like the NSA/CIA could easily stay a step ahead of anything commonly available. If the transmission is spread-spectrum it could be really hard to detect. Heck, they could point a laser at a window and have it trigger once every few days in the middle of the night - good luck spotting that.
agreed, it sound theoretically possible minus the 8 mile claim.
Looking at the Spiegel article at least one of the USB options also includes a separate module for long-term communications. It sounds like the USB does the exploit and interface into the PC, and a separate module acts as a relay for longer range. Makes sense - it seems like they are targeting a variety of exploits like USB, PCI, etc - which gives you more options as to how to tap any particular target. There was an article a way back about people messing with fuzz attacks over the USB bus and that OSes were surprisingly vulnerable to hostile USB hardware. In theory that mouse you just bought could be used to hack into your PC.
Tesla makes the drivetrain for the RAV4EV, which ends up being about a $20k premium over the equivalent, gasoline based RAV4....Frankly, if it takes a company 13 years to go from no product, to 5 years later an extremely high end, only the super rich can afford situation to a situation, that's fine, then 8 years later they're at hey, an upper middle class, or even middle class individual can afford their vehicle, I'd consider that reasonable.
I wouldn't consider a car with a $20k premium above a price that is already over $20k upper-middle class. Upper-middle class is being able to afford a RAV4 with a conventional drive train in the first place.
US median household income is about $50k/yr.
That aside, I'm not really opposed to R&D benefiting the rich before it benefits the poor, or the fact that sometimes it takes 10 years to really pay off. That's the kind of research the government really should be funding in the first place. It really should be looked at in terms of how it has the potential to improve quality of life for everybody in the long-term, and not how many jobs it creates. If I invented a robot that would replace every job that exists so that we could all watch TV and be chauffeured around all day, that would be a huge improvement in quality of life even though it would destroy every job in the country.
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Actually, it is much more likely that a CLA will be found to be unenforcable than the text of a well-established software license. In fact, CLAs requiring copyright assignment are probably void in large parts of the world, meaning you are back to square one.
Well, no country enforces IP like the US does anyway, so it really matters most whether they're enforceable in the US. When was the last time you heard of Germany handing down a billion-dollar judgment over a couple of defines?
The FSFe's FLA purports to solve this very problem. It also is designed to revert all rights to the original author if the licensee attempts to relicense the code under a proprietary license. I'm certainly not a German lawyer but it seems reasonably likely to be accepted by countries that uphold author's rights because not only does the copyright remain with the author, but the agreement actually is designed to protect their philosophical choice in licensing their code under a free software license.
He was using a video recording device (i.e. wearing it with the camera pointed at the screen) in a cinema. All cinemas I've been to forbid that kind of thing for obvious reasons. I don't think he was "wrongly harassed and detained".
That's only true if you accept that it is OK to ban pointing a recording device at a movie screen and not actually recording anything. I wouldn't be surprised if the law actually bans the possession of a recording device in a theater, which is something EVERYBODY breaks. Heck, there is a policy at my workplace that says that no employee may possess a camera that isn't registered with security. Back in the early 2000s (after everybody already had cell phone cameras) they even posted a sign by the gates stating that cell phone cameras are banned and should be turned into security. Even the corporate-issued cell phones were in violation of the policy. Yet, it remained policy all the same.
People with the power to make laws enjoy making laws that make no sense. They're always overly broad in their scope, that way they can use discretionary enforcement. The company clearly doesn't want to fire all of its employees, but if they even suspect that an employee is taking photos of documents or whatever they can just search them on the way out the door and sure enough they'll have a reason to fire them.
In this case Glass was also the guy's prescription glasses. Does he need to carry two sets of glasses now?
And who would use Glass to pirate a movie in the first place? I doubt the video quality is all that great, and it is attached to a head that is constantly bobbing around. Plus they are worn in plain sight. Anybody who wants to pirate a movie will just bring in a concealed camera and mount it to a stable surface, or more likely still just collaborate with the theater owner. The whole idea of distributing a movie to thousands of theaters and then trying to keep it off of the internet is crazy to begin with - all it takes is one recording, and if they happen to get 2 they can even strip out the watermarking by comparing frames.
The Linux kernel not getting relicensed under a newer form of the GPL is a feature, not a bug.
Yeah, explain that to me in 10 years when some court rules that contributions under the GPL are illegal to distribute due to some legal deficiency in the license. Suddenly there is no linux kernel, because there is no way to switch to a newer license that does not have that attribute.
Sure, that might never happen, just as a firmware burned into a ROM might never need upgrading. However, if it does you're up the creek. The whole GPL2+ thing is about having an insurance policy.
Well, when you get down to that level it is a bit less deterministic than your illustration makes it sound like. The ribosome doesn't try out one tRNA after another per-se - it just makes it really easy for a peptide bond to form if the codon matches well. There is some rate at which incorrect amino acids are added (well, a rate for every combination of tRNA and mRNA sequence/position), and a much higher rate at which correct ones are added. Incorrect and correct amino acids can also be removed, and I imagine the rate of the former is high and the rate of the latter is low. All of this ends up resulting in peptides being formed correctly.
When you get down to the atomic level it is all probabilities and kinetics, even in computer chips. There is some probability that a 1 stored in a RAM chip will get read as a 0, but the circuitry operates at a scale/speed/etc where that probability is very low. Biological systems tend not to use quite the same level of "digitization" and so mistakes are much more common, but then again when a cell cranks out a protein it doesn't just crank out one, so if on occasion one has a defect it is usually no big deal.
Kind of depends how you define "execute." DNA contains control structures, and coding regions. It gets copied, and then used as a blueprint for making proteins (ribosomes are the "CPU" for this and are basically a combination of proteins and RNA). Then the proteins themselves do things.
RNA is an interesting sub-example, because it can be functional as well as a blueprint at the same time. Many think that life started out with RNA as a result, and the ribosome is found in all living organisms and is dependent on RNA for its operation. Even in humans the RNA is basically just a copy of some piece of DNA.
Now, just how often DNA is "executed" is another matter. When you talk about chemicals binding to it the "clock speeds" could be seen as being very fast, as these chemicals are constantly binding and unbinding all the time. When you talk about the process of copying DNA or making proteins out of it, the speed isn't all that fast. Google suggests that the rate is about 500 bases per minute. A base contains 2 bits worth of information, so that is 16bps. DNA replication is about 60x faster. However, biological processes are highly parallelized - at any time a cell might be transcribing hundreds of genes, and especially in bacteria there might be many copies of the same gene being created in parallel at once, and many proteins being made at once off of each copy. When a eukaryote replicates its DNA it copies it from numerous points at once. And then of course an animal is made of billions of cells on top of that.
So, compared to a modern CPU many information-processing functions in the cell are incredibly slow. However, they're also incredibly parallel and asynchronous.
If you expand the definition of 'code' to VHDL and other hardware design languages, there must be 'code' doing far more than a graphics chip would.
Another intermediate state would be DSPs. These historically have run at very high clock speeds for their time, but they perform a very simple set of tasks. GPUs are another example - those run at fairly high clock speeds, and are usually highly parallel.
Not really sure we want to count those, however.
That's the whole thing about "due process." The courts simply argue that as long as the process is followed it is kosher. The process might be to waterboard you and then run you through a meat grinder, but hey, the constitution says "due process" so it must be kosher. Well, that is if you didn't eat pork in the previous 72 hours...
Oh, I agree completely. The difference is that with paper currency only somebody like the Federal Government could be bothered to track serial numbers. Considering that the US Government already photos the exterior of every letter that is mailed it seems like logging something that actually has a serial number would be child's play (google Mail Isolation Control and Tracking).
With Bitcoin anybody could easily track serial numbers, because a lot more about transactions is published, and everything is already accessible in a structured manner.
The funny thing was that I showed a picture of this to a diabetic friend and told them that it measured blood sugar through the eye. They literally shrieked in horror thinking that it meant that it would be stabbing them in the eye.
I don't have diabetes but I am fairly close to somebody who does have diabetes. Having a continuous log of sugar levels is something that is VERY useful in treating the condition. Sure, just having an alert would certainly be useful, not but really sufficient.
One issue I see with contacts is that they can't really be left in 24x7 without increased risk of complications. Of course, many people do just this all the same. Blood sugars dropping during sleep is definitely a scenario that you'd want your sensor to cover. Having an audible alarm would probably be a good idea - I'm not sure if a flashing light would be sufficient to wake somebody (though it would be inside your eyelids - I honestly have no idea how well that works for waking people).
Of course, what diabetics really need is a closed-loop system that both continuously measures sugar levels and administers insulin. It seems like we're rather close to making that work - the main issue is that we don't really have reliable real-time continuous monitoring via sensors. Most sensor technologies have considerable latencies - you're getting a measurement of what your sugars were 15 minutes ago. That is good enough to sound an alarm before a trend becomes dangerous, but not really good enough for a feedback loop.
Fair enough. Maybe I've just never seen a car as something I'd want to sink 15% of my income into, but then I wasn't into the fashion of getting my ARM adjusted by the government either...
If the entire body has less energy than the energy needed to break whatever type of bond is holding its atoms together, there is zero probability in classical physics of any atom breaking free, as even in the unlikely scenario that the energy of the entire system ended up in one atom, it wouldn't be enough. This would still be above absolute zero.
I'll agree with you on that one. Of course, that is still limited to classical mechanics, and storing the kg prototype at fraction of a degree above absolute zero has a whole different set of problems, which was my original point.
If you had something like a 1% chance per century of losing an atom, on a time scale of a century your expected sublimation would be zero, although on a time scale of a billion years it would be different.
No, over the period of a century your expected rate of sublimation would be somewhere between zero and the weight of an atom. You can't just turn small numbers into zero simply because they're small. Well, I guess it works if you are into credit default swaps.
In any case, at the temperatures that would make the sublimation rate anywhere near that low there would be a bunch of other practical problems with the maintenance of the kg prototype.
My point was that when you're talking about measurements at the level of precision required just about any effect of physics becomes relevant. Ok, so you drop the temperature to .0000001K. Then in the year 20,000 after you've finished cooling it down enough, then how do you weigh it without warming it back up or having the temperature cause other problems? Oh, and how do you keep random molecules of gas from diffusing into your storage vessel and instantly condensing onto the surface (and warming it up considerably in the process)?
Perhaps you should read the whole post before replying. Both things you mention fall under this exception:
"(B) The equipment is designed, operated, and configured in a manner that prevents the driver of the motor vehicle from viewing the television broadcast or video signal while operating the vehicle in a safe and reasonable manner."
Perhaps you should read the whole post before replying. The exceptions only pertain to equipment that is "installed in a vehicle." A phone in either your pocket or a passenger's hands is not "installed in a vehicle."
Also, neither is designed in a manner that prevents the driver from viewing a broadcast. It might be operated in that way, but the law requires it to be "designed, operated, AND configured" to prevent such use.
But, as far as I read the law none of the exceptions apply to anything that isn't bolted down.
Sadly you need a bunch of lawyers to write a lawyer-proof definition and the Bill of Rights is very far from that.
I submit that it is impossible to create any law that has a lawyer-proof definition. People have brains and can adapt - anything written once on paper cannot. It will always come down to the decisions made by those in positions of power, like judges. As soon as every judge says "I'm not going to approve this forfeiture action" the whole system goes away, at least until the executive branch says "I'm not going to bother asking a court for permission." Then the system just gets exposed for what it already is...
I do agree with you, but I've also seen examples of the opposite situation happening at work. When you don't put the financial factors into the decision making, then there is never a reason to say "go." If the engineer gets fired when the ship blows up, and they get paid to work on the ship more when the launch is canceled, then the incentive is for the engineer to perpetually say that the ship needs more work. If you need 75 engineers to agree on the launch decision, then it will NEVER launch.
So, companies are used to overriding engineer decisions because that's the only way they can stay in business. The problem here was that they went too far. The problem is that since the guys in charge aren't engineers, they can't tell when too far is too far. If you look at the recordings/transcripts/etc of the Challenger launch decision it is pretty obvious that they went too far, but it obviously wasn't apparent to those making the decisions.
That's the problem with quality decisions - how do you decide when quality is "good enough" given that there will ALWAYS be some risk of failure? And what happens to the companies that make the "right" decision? Do they then go out of business when they're undercut by a company willing to make the "wrong" decision?
At work we have people in QA roles who have no incentive to ever say yes to anything. It results in a lot of quality-on-paper type activities that really add little value and a great deal of cost, and it often comes at the expense of things that would actually improve quality. The typical example of this is bugs that get left unfixed because the cost of the process to fix them is greater than the cost of just living with the bug, even if it is obvious to anybody with technical knowledge that just changing one line of code would eliminate a problem that bugs every user every day.
This kind of "safety no matter how many people die" logic is why airline pilots get automatic alerts and conflict resolution before crashing into another airliner, but not before crashing into some plane built back into the 60s. If you stuck about $100 worth of hardware in the small plane then both planes would benefit from the improved situational awareness, but the problem is that due to safety regulations the $100 worth of hardware costs $15k to install, and so the small plane isn't equipped with it. Thus the safety regulations make everybody less safe.
The HUD is specifically built and engineered to assist the pilot, and nothing else. Finally, unless it's a fighter jet, the HUD doesn't swallow the entire pilot's field-of-view. HUD gear is certified by the FAA before use on a given model/type of aircraft.
Notice that Google Glass on some douchebag's face while driving his/her car is the polar fucking opposite of all these things. :/
As has been passed along in many an aviation list this week there is one thing that Google Glass would be capable of legally telling any passenger in an aircraft - that the aircraft is landing 10 miles away from the intended destination. It is, of course, illegal for a pilot to use it.
And yes, I realize that the navigation equipment in the cockpit was also capable of indicating this fact. Indeed, most likely the airport in front of them was identified on the MFD.
As stated by others, there are laws against monitors while driving on a public road.
The law in question bans the use of a smartphone by a passenger in the front seat. Read it. Any monitor of any kind forward of the rear of the driver's seat is banned. Presumably you can put the super bowl on in the back seat if you watch it through the rear view mirror though.
The most important consideration about driving: driving on public roads is a privilege, not a right.
I'd like you to find that in the Constitution somewhere. I'll raise you the 9th amendment. Just because cars didn't exist in the 1700s doesn't mean that people are less free to operate them than colonialists were to operate horses.
But hey, the Constitution doesn't say anything about reading every text message sent by anybody on the planet either, so...
A person shall not drive a motor vehicle if a television receiver, a video monitor, or a television or video screen, or any other similar means of visually displaying a television broadcast or video signal that produces entertainment or business applications, is operating and is located in the motor vehicle at a point forward of the back of the driver’s seat
The rest of the sentence has an "or" in it, so simply violating this bit of the law is sufficient to be a crime.
From my reading of this, a smartphone inside your pocket would be illegal if not powered off. It is capable of displaying entertainment or business applications, it is operating, and it is located forward of the back of the driver's seat.
I guess it depends on the definition of "operating" - if it only means that TV is being displayed, then it would be illegal for somebody in the front passenger seat to operate a smart phone.
The law is ridiculous. Of course, so are half the laws on the books and that doesn't stop them from being enforced...
Who is this "Bitcoin community" who decided that the bitcoins were stolen? And why should I trust that group of people? After all, if they decide that those Bitcoins are stolen, how can I be sure that they won't mark my Bitcoins as stolen should I ever do something they don't like (whatever that may be)?
Well, it really boils down to freedom of speech - those bitcoins are forever traceable back to this operation. Anybody can choose to accept them in a trade or refuse to accept them in a trade. If the perception is that there are many out there who would not accept them, then their value is likely to be reduced, as even those willing to accept them in a trade probably would prefer not to since they could be higher to sell.
And yes, it probably does reduce the value of Bitcoin on the whole, but there isn't anything that anybody can do about that. This isn't an anonymous currency.
Has Ulbricht actually been found - in a court of law - to be either, or confessed to being so? Not so far as I've heard.
This is an asset forfeiture case. He isn't being tried or punished. His assets are being tried in a court of law, and the constitution doesn't give any human rights to assets, so they aren't entitled to such novelties as "trial by jury" or "innocent until proven guilty" or the "right to confront witnesses." Don't worry though, every time a stack of money was asked to speak up if they had any concerns with the proceedings it went along in silent acquiescence.
In drug cases the first thing the US Government typically does is seize any assets they can find and use forfeiture to confiscate them with only an administrative procedure. The owner of the assets has no standing in the court to speak or prevent this - he is technically not under trial.
Of course, when the accused is finally under trial he'll have a much harder time of it now that he has no assets with which to pay a lawyer. Oh, and if he is found to be innocent it doesn't change the fact that his assets were already found to be guilty. Apparently you can try to sue to get your money back, but you need to prove the innocence of the assets in question.
And yes, if this sounds absolutely insane, that merely demonstrates that you aren't.
No, the key word is effective, as in you scale it to the needs of the system. You can adjust what is "cold enough" such that the probability of it subliming on the time scale of centuries is zero. It will still sublime on some longer timescale. You can work out that classically, around 7 K there would be is likely not a single atom in the whole kilogram prototype with enough energy to escape the surface.
So, which is it? "Zero" probability, or "likely" not a single atom. They are NOT the same thing. You can lower the sublimation rate to an arbitrarily low level via classical physics, but you can never make it zero.
You obviously missed my point by removing details from the quote. The upper middle class car that I'm talking about is the vehicle that Tesla is claiming will be to market in approximately 3 years and will be in the $35k range. Tesla was founded in 2003, 5 years later, the Roadster came out, 8 years after that, they're aiming to have an upper middle class price point.
I did miss that, but doesn't really change my point. $35k cars are owned by the wealthy, not the upper-middle-class. How is somebody making somewhat over $50k/yr household income going to buy a $35k car?
I do get that over time their products will become more affordable.
I had attended a training session several years ago at REI, a company that produces counter surveillance equipment. Aside from strongly pushing their products, the classes were extremely informative and demonstrated techniques to detect just these sorts of things.
This is a cat and mouse came - I'm sure somebody like the NSA/CIA could easily stay a step ahead of anything commonly available. If the transmission is spread-spectrum it could be really hard to detect. Heck, they could point a laser at a window and have it trigger once every few days in the middle of the night - good luck spotting that.
agreed, it sound theoretically possible minus the 8 mile claim.
Looking at the Spiegel article at least one of the USB options also includes a separate module for long-term communications. It sounds like the USB does the exploit and interface into the PC, and a separate module acts as a relay for longer range. Makes sense - it seems like they are targeting a variety of exploits like USB, PCI, etc - which gives you more options as to how to tap any particular target. There was an article a way back about people messing with fuzz attacks over the USB bus and that OSes were surprisingly vulnerable to hostile USB hardware. In theory that mouse you just bought could be used to hack into your PC.
Tesla makes the drivetrain for the RAV4EV, which ends up being about a $20k premium over the equivalent, gasoline based RAV4....Frankly, if it takes a company 13 years to go from no product, to 5 years later an extremely high end, only the super rich can afford situation to a situation, that's fine, then 8 years later they're at hey, an upper middle class, or even middle class individual can afford their vehicle, I'd consider that reasonable.
I wouldn't consider a car with a $20k premium above a price that is already over $20k upper-middle class. Upper-middle class is being able to afford a RAV4 with a conventional drive train in the first place.
US median household income is about $50k/yr.
That aside, I'm not really opposed to R&D benefiting the rich before it benefits the poor, or the fact that sometimes it takes 10 years to really pay off. That's the kind of research the government really should be funding in the first place. It really should be looked at in terms of how it has the potential to improve quality of life for everybody in the long-term, and not how many jobs it creates. If I invented a robot that would replace every job that exists so that we could all watch TV and be chauffeured around all day, that would be a huge improvement in quality of life even though it would destroy every job in the country.