One big issue that I discovered is that if you put them in a fixture they'll be far more prone to dying an early death. It doesn't take much heat to destroy the ballast in one of these bulbs - so they don't do well in enclosed places.
Fully functional, toner, drum, fuser, and all. The toner had to be loaded into the printer, but that is probably so that they could put guards into the printer itself for structural support during shipping. I took my time to be careful, but it could have been set up in 10 minutes by anybody familiar with color lasers in general.
Note - 1 drum in this model - so color is slower than BW. Still, at 30PPM BW and 5-10 in color it isn't bad at all. For very high volumes you want 4 drums.
My Dell 3100cn works great and was on sale for $300 shipped. Did well on reviews and cost per page is 1.5/4.5 cents (BW/Color). Networked and handles PCL 6 - didn't advertise PS but it actually seems to work for me (unless CUPS is translating). In any case, got it working with linux which is no small feat in general (foomatic is about as easy to set up as it sounds like it should be)...:)
Really designed to be a workgroup printer and it is a bit large, but the footprint isn't really all that much larger than my old inkjet (slightly narrower, barely deeper when you consider the paper output path on an inkjet that must remain clear, and WAY taller).
Prices have dropped A LOT. I got a 3100cn for $300 shipped. Hard to beat that even with a higher-end inkjet. That toner will last forever too - cost per page has to be 1/10th ink.
Couldn't agree more regarding inkjets in general. I was getting sick of spending $100/yr in ink easily (only expected to increase as kids advance in school), constant head cleaning operations (using more ink!), and calls from home while at work over printer issues.
I resigned to buying a laser - even at the loss of color. Then I discovered that color lasers are now affordable - I was shocked to be able to buy a Dell color laser for $300 shipped (no tax). Toner should last about as long as the printer at the rate we print - we have photos printed at walmart since it is generally cheaper and quality is superior. Only a few cents per page even in color.
Inkjets don't make sense any more - sometimes you have to spend money to save it - and you don't need to spend all that much...
Note that just about the only way you could actually win Contra was via the cheat code. 3 lives and no ability to resume/save the game was definitely right up there with ghosts and goblins (I cannot begin to conceive how much time would be required to complete that game without a cheat of some kind).
Oh wait, the US doesn't mind Pakistan having Nuclear weapons because they are an ally...
I wouldn't say that the US doesn't mind it. However, at this point it is a moot point - the US isn't in a position to reverse the current situation.
The current administration wasn't in power when Pakistan developed nuclear weapons. If it were US action would have been somewhat more likely. However, one issue is that the nuclear weapon escalation in that region started with India, and the US would have been unlikely to use military force against India - a democratic borderline-1st-world nation. At the time the US was offering substantial benefits to Pakistan if they did not test nuclear weapons in kind. However, having allowed India to test them the US really wasn't in a position to take a hard line with Pakistan. It certainly would have been possible though - I'm sure India would have allowed the staging of attacks from its soil. Contrary to general/. opinion, most US citizens aren't really in favor of randomly toppling democratic governments - regardless of past US actions from the cold war.
2) Ability convince Venezuela and russia to stop taking dollars for oil thereby collapsing the value of the dollar.
Wouldn't be too sure on that one - those countries have alliances of convenience with Iran, and in fact are competitors on oil export. There really is no reason for them to think that they're next in line for a US invasion, and in fact they'll probably appreciate the hike in prices. Why tick off the US when it is better to just sell them more oil at far higher prices?
5) Ability to sink US and Israeli ships.
Doubtful. Any radar installation on the coast would be out of commission on the first night of the war. Ships need only stay out of range of fairly small land-launched missiles. The people launching them would not have any intel on the position of US warships. Missile attacks would be small in scale, so anti-missile defenses would have a shot at them. The Iranian air force would be a non-issue - just one more thing for the US air force to allocate forces to suppress, and therefore slow down bombing on the first few days, but they're not going to make any kind of coordinated attack on the US navy.
6) The ability to close the Persian gulf to all shipment of oil.
Questionable. They'd need intel on the location of ships to attack them, and if formed into convoys they could be protected against many forms of attack if given escorts. In fact, a move to blockade the gulf would in some sense increase US power - nobody is getting oil except via US protection, so the US can now choose who gets oil deliveries simply by refusing escort services to anyone else.
Russia doesn't need the oil and since china gets along with Iran and actually has dialog with them they can strike a deal at today's rates for an exclusive contract. All of Iran's oil goes to china at current market rates, the rest of the world pays through the nose, russia/Venezuela/Saudi-Arabia laugh all the way to the bank.
The fact is that the ground war would only last a week before the country enters a state not unlike that in Iraq - with the US holding control at national level while individual cities are in a state of anarchy. The US will be the only one in a position to dictate who gets oil shipments - although most likely supply will be greatly reduced from present levels. There won't be any other power in Iran for other nations to even negotiate with - the only non-US power will be resistance movements, terror cells, and opposition leaders with no real political control (but lots of influence over the masses). While these opposition forces can make life difficult for US forces, they don't actually have any control over oil distribution (other than to disrupt it).
And if the US did fight a long run-up air war and sensed that Iran was brokering deals with other partners, they would probably bomb a few pipelines and then nobody is getting oil except by sea (which the US controls).
How much is the happiness of Israel worth the rest of the world? Probably not that much. Nobody really likes them all that much anyway.
Well, in the US they actually have a fair amount of support. In the end it will probably come down to US interests though. If the US feels that a strongly-opposed nation with control of oil reserves needed for the US economy stands to gain nuclear weapons it is reasonably likely that the US will preemptively attack. The rest of the world doesn't really matter all that much as far as military power is concerned (the US does not need much support to occupy Iran), and for the most part they don't gain much from making a big stink out of the US invasion. No doubt there will be posturing, but little action. The posturing will likely occur whether the US invades or not (most nations that raise grips with US policy tend to do so across the board, and as a result the US isn't really counting on much support from them anyway). And, which is a better alliance of convenience - the US or Iran? China and Russia really don't have tha
CPUID isn't really trusted computing - if you have a program that checks the CPUID it is easy enough to bypass - just edit the executable and patch out the part that checks it. Or if you want to be really fancy run it in a VM and give it a bogus CPUID.
The idea of TPM is to prevent these sorts of attacks. The software will ask the TPM for its ID, and the hash of the boot sector. The TPM will reply with an SSL-signed response - so you can't tamper with it. You can only forge it if you have an SSL cert signed by somebody trusted by whoever is looking for your machine state. The software then asks the boot program for the hash of the OS kernel, and the OS kernel for the hash of the program itself. If any of those hashes aren't found in some online database, then some media vendor is going to refuse to send data to you. Potentially your ISP won't let you connect.
The problem with TPM is that you end up with a chip with an embedded private key that you don't know. That means that this chip can report on what is happening at a low level, and the only thing you can possibly do is just block it from working. Of course, no working chip, no internet for you (or DRM-ed media, or whatever).
Now, if the owner of the computer got a copy of the TPM keys installed within, it would be a great tool. I could tell my fileserver to disallow connections from hacked clients, for example. My kids PCs wouldn't run binaries that weren't signed by me. If somehow something did run my router would block it from all network communications. If I hold the keys to the kingdom (the TPM keys) then all this fancy hardware works for ME, and that is great. However, if I don't hold these keys then my hardware works for whoever does hold them.
So if Linux is useful for the desktop then it's fine, else I'll move to a different system.
I think the point of OSS is that if you feel that way, it is time to get coding, or testing, or documenting, or making wikis, or helping out on mail-lists, or whatever is that you do well. Linux will be useful on the desktop when contributers decide they want to make it that way.
If you don't want to contribute but just want a cheap OS that does what you want, then pay somebody to make an OS work the way you want it to work (doubt they'll be able to make it much cheaper than Windows/OSX/whatever).
What I hear a lot of people complaining about is the fact that people choose to donate code under licenses that make it very difficult to couple the code with proprietary software. What they don't get is that this is an intentional design decision on the part of those writing the code. And, since they're the ones donating their time, they're the ones who get to decide what terms their time is donated under. Many of these devs really don't care if anybody actually uses their software - at least not to a degree that they are willing to compromise their principles regarding proprietary software. If I held copyright to a chunk of an OSS project, and some vendor wanted me to relicense it so that they could use it in some bundled closed-source app, then I'd be happy to work something out, but it wouldn't be for free. If they want to make a buck on my labor, then they ought to pay for the right.
I guess what it comes down to is the fact that many OSS contributors don't really care that desperately if linux succeeds on the desktop - even those who make desktop-oriented software for it. Sure, they want to succeed, but only on their own terms - even if it means ultimately not succeeding except within the community.
Uh, these machines seem vulnerable to a number of attacks:
1. The program embedded in the machine could be altered. This would be undetectable as no record exists of how people actually voted other than that stored in RAM. Sure, the program is burned into the CPU, but who says somebody can't make their own CPUswith alternate programming?
2. The program in the tallying machine could be altered to record something other than what was actually stored on the voting machines. This could be detected if the individual machines are preserved for a recount - assuming they cannot be altered by the tally machine.
The whole reason people want paper ballots (whether as primary or secondary sources) is so that the voter gets to see the actual recorded vote on something that can be recounted. Plus, paper has the advantage of being understandable.
Machines are still valuable - they can prevent invalid votes from being cast which prevents the whole Florida fiasco. However, they are easy to tamper and it is hard to tell when this happens, so we need a way to audit them.
Agreed. The recount doesn't even need to be total - just a few percent if truly random would prevent fraud (assuming you nail people to the wall when they are caught). Auditing of important processes is routine in all industries - you'd think voting would just be common-sense.
The irony of corporate firewalls and email size limits is that when I had to send 100MB of data to another company I ended up doing so by FedExing a CD-R. Would have taken 1/10th the time and 1/10000th the cost via an FTP site, but how many non-IT companies have FTP sites? I figured my employer wouldn't appreciate it if I uploaded it to my webserver at home...:)
Really convincing evidence should show a clear increase before and after patents. I'm not necessarily talking about an increase in absolute numbers mind you.
Much of your arguments are covered by and answered by the report. Basically it disagrees with you.
I thought you just got done telling me that the report did not cover evidence showing (or not showing) a clear increase before and after patents. Where is this covered in the report? I'd have assumed that if you already had this info you wouldn't have asked me to provide it.
As far as a report existing that disagrees with me, well I suppose I'll just have to live with that...:)
Actually, I believe that hot intergalactic gas is supposed to be the bulk of the baryonic matter in the universe. You are right that it is sparse (one electron for every 10m^2 or something like that). It is ionized as most of the gas probably fell into clusters from voids and has tremendous speeds - one collision later and the electron goes one way and the proton another. The mass ends up being huge as the volume is enormous.
The only thing that 'status quo' shows is that patents do not devastate the medical research completely. Really convincing evidence should show a clear increase before and after patents. I'm not necessarily talking about an increase in absolute numbers mind you.
Considering that patents have been around in most lucrative markets long before drugs were developed, such evidence would be very difficult to obtain. How would you perform such an experiment short of abolishing patents? Just looking at single-country results is meaningless - nobody develops drugs with the goal of marketing them in Italy - they get sold there simply because once the costs are sunk you might as well sell them everywhere.
It is very clear that drugs don't get developed when there isn't a market for them. There are a number of clear examples. Just look at diseases that plague 3rd-world nations - they aren't rapidly cured as there is no money in it. If you get rid of patents the 1st-world nations are no different. Another example would be antibiotics - there are no new ones as nobody would pay premium patent-protected prices for some space-age antibiotic when penicillin does the job fine. However, all doctors would agree that we need more antibiotics. The only way they will show up is if governments fund R&D. If you get rid of patents you put every class of drugs in the same situation.
Basically the issue is that drug development costs money. It doesn't happen without heavy investment. Nobody invests money unless they are likely to get a return, unless they're a government agency or charity. Patents exist to generate this return. Without them you can certainly have publicly-funded R&D, but you won't have private investment. Maybe this works fine, but as I pointed out before you can have public funding of R&D without having to get rid of patents at all - ie have the best of both worlds.
Look at it like the FSF. They aren't out to ban proprietary software. They're out to compete with it and win. Now, software patents do interfere with this and they are a different beast since they tend to be general. Drug patents tend to be specific - the patent exists for a particular molecule. If you could get a patent for any drug that cures cancer I would agree that it is time to reform the system.
If there is a better way to develop drugs the solution is to just compete and win. ESR and Co didn't whine about MS Word - they wrote EMACS. Linus didn't whine about Windows - he wrote Linux. So, don't whine when chemists want to be paid to develop drugs - get out there and discover your own drugs, find volunteers to formulate them, find volunteers to test them out (good luck!), and make your own free drugs. Or, if you think you can afford to pay money for these activities without having patent protection on the final product then get a loan and try it.
The problem you'll run into is that while anybody with a $500 PC can write patches for linux, it takes a LOT more capital to outfit and run a lab, and good luck finding beta testers for your products...:)
It is tempting to take a solution that works well in one industry and apply it to others. The fact is that while I embrace free software and use it anywhere I can, it doesn't always work even in the software industry. To expect the idea to work everywhere is simplistic.
Let's not ASSUME that there is no way to harness it. Let's just say we haven't found the way to harvest it. The human race should never stop trying to do something, just because others believe it to not be possible.
Well, suffice it to say that without a substantial rewriting of the laws of physics there is no way to harness it.
If there is something seriously wrong with the laws of physics it is inevitable that we'll find it as we export ever more minute or large-scale phenomena. We don't need to spend needless time trying to find it in ordinary situations that have already been studied to death.
Vacuum energy is just a pressure on objects that are closeby in a vacuum, I believe. That in itself isn't enough to power anything, unless it is allowed to move the objects. That works, but eventually the objects collide and you can't get the energy source back without moving the objects back to their original positions, which requires all the energy you put in.
You need more than a force to generate power. You need a cycle.
Think of it another way - a 1 ton steel ball suspended over the earth has tremendous force acting on it, but there is no way to harvest it unless you allow it to fall. However, the source of energy goes away the second the ball hits the ground, since it takes all the energy you recovered to raise it back to its starting position.
Now, somebody might understand vacuum energy better than I, but that is how I see it...
Well, I agree that "practically free" is as good as free, but that isn't what is claimed by this company. They claim to be creating energy out of nothing, which is highly improbable.
Remember it onyl takes a tiny weak spark to get massive amounts of power out of gasoline. It just depends on what form that 'spark' comes in, and what form of 'gasoline' you're using.
Yes, but in this case the energy isn't coming from "nowhere" - it is coming from the gas and is depleted as the gas burns.
Most car AC units have an energy coefficiency of somewhere around 400% - for every one watt of power used four watts of heat are removed. So having greater than 100% isn't impossible.
Coefficient of performance is different from the efficiency of an engine. In fact, for a reversible engine I belive it is the inverse of its efficiency when operated in the opposite manner.
The coefficient of performance measures how much heat is moved for a given input of work. Efficiency measures how much work is performed for a given input of heat.
In the case of this proposed generation technique, it is given that no heat is input, and yet work is output. This would be an infinite efficiency, and a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. All engines leak some heat to a cold sink.
This is definitely a big part of poker. If I play somebody, and they only bet if they have AK, or similar, then any time I see them bet I'm going to fold in an instant, and in the rare cases that they get strong hands they won't get anywhere with them. On the other hand, I can bet when they probably have nothing and they'll cave in letting me rob the blinds. Now, if I play a strong player and bluff liberally I'll lose fast.
The important thing in poker is to not be readable. You need to vary your game.
This is the traditional problem with AI opponents - they can be easy to read, while not reading others. It can't just fold anything less than a straight flush every time I go all-in no matter what the pot-odds say. Otherwise it will get beat by trivial play.
There is a third philosophical position, which is agnostic but somewhat libertarian:whether or not you are for DRM, if people want to link DRM modules into your code it's none of your business.
And there is another position that you don't state. People can have all the DRM they want, but don't use my code to accomplish it. That is all the GPL v3 states. Tivo can use DRM if they want, but they'll have to write their own OS to do it, or buy one from somebody else. (Well, at least that would be the case if linux went GPLv3).
All the arguing over Torvolds/Stallman is silly. Linux can't go v3 even if it wanted to since the license wasn't made flexible from the start. The GPLv3 debate will be waged in other projects.
Well, the status quo would be one form of evidence - tons of drugs on the market and patents are currently allowed. Obviously it is hard to do experimentation without making it an all-or-nothing proposition.
Another piece of evidence is pediatric extensions. A recent law (well, that is in the last 20 years) allowed pharam companies to extend their drug patents if they did testing on pediatric formulations of their drugs. As a result almost all major drugs are tested for pediatric use. Before the law this was very rare - who is going to test cholesterol medication on children when the market is non-existant? However, the fact is that a small number of kids do need this medication and as a result of the patent extension the companies have incentive to perform the testing. If the patent extension wasn't needed it would have been done before, but it wasn't.
Rather than just abolishing drug patents, there is a middle-ground solution. You could just have the NIH fund drug research, defensively patenting the resulting compounds and licensing them for free use by anyone. Then after a few years or a decade you could see how well publicly-funded medicine works out in comparison to the pharma industry. Patients would have a selection of cheap public medicines and expensive private ones. If the public R&D works out well, then the private industry will dwindle and the patent issue becomes moot. If the public R&D effort becomes a boondoggle as libertarian-minded folks argue, then it will be obvious and we will still at least have the status quo. This is better than just abolishing patents and potentially decimating the entire drug industry, which would be slow to recover even if the laws were reversed (after all, investors will be shy to spend a lot if the public could just destroy their investments again in the future).
If you mount a truecrypt volume that contains a hidden volume and you don't specify the hidden volume passphrase then it just mounts the non-hidden volume. The non-hidden volume behaves as if it occupies the full space of the file/device it is contained in - if you write lots of data it will keep on writing right over the hidden volume, destroying it (without any way to tell this is happening). The only way to safely write to the outer volume is to mount it with the passwords to both volumes - which then lets it protect the data in the hidden volume when modifying the outer volume.
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One big issue that I discovered is that if you put them in a fixture they'll be far more prone to dying an early death. It doesn't take much heat to destroy the ballast in one of these bulbs - so they don't do well in enclosed places.
Fully functional, toner, drum, fuser, and all. The toner had to be loaded into the printer, but that is probably so that they could put guards into the printer itself for structural support during shipping. I took my time to be careful, but it could have been set up in 10 minutes by anybody familiar with color lasers in general.
Note - 1 drum in this model - so color is slower than BW. Still, at 30PPM BW and 5-10 in color it isn't bad at all. For very high volumes you want 4 drums.
My Dell 3100cn works great and was on sale for $300 shipped. Did well on reviews and cost per page is 1.5/4.5 cents (BW/Color). Networked and handles PCL 6 - didn't advertise PS but it actually seems to work for me (unless CUPS is translating). In any case, got it working with linux which is no small feat in general (foomatic is about as easy to set up as it sounds like it should be)... :)
Really designed to be a workgroup printer and it is a bit large, but the footprint isn't really all that much larger than my old inkjet (slightly narrower, barely deeper when you consider the paper output path on an inkjet that must remain clear, and WAY taller).
Prices have dropped A LOT. I got a 3100cn for $300 shipped. Hard to beat that even with a higher-end inkjet. That toner will last forever too - cost per page has to be 1/10th ink.
Couldn't agree more regarding inkjets in general. I was getting sick of spending $100/yr in ink easily (only expected to increase as kids advance in school), constant head cleaning operations (using more ink!), and calls from home while at work over printer issues.
I resigned to buying a laser - even at the loss of color. Then I discovered that color lasers are now affordable - I was shocked to be able to buy a Dell color laser for $300 shipped (no tax). Toner should last about as long as the printer at the rate we print - we have photos printed at walmart since it is generally cheaper and quality is superior. Only a few cents per page even in color.
Inkjets don't make sense any more - sometimes you have to spend money to save it - and you don't need to spend all that much...
Note that just about the only way you could actually win Contra was via the cheat code. 3 lives and no ability to resume/save the game was definitely right up there with ghosts and goblins (I cannot begin to conceive how much time would be required to complete that game without a cheat of some kind).
Oh wait, the US doesn't mind Pakistan having Nuclear weapons because they are an ally...
/. opinion, most US citizens aren't really in favor of randomly toppling democratic governments - regardless of past US actions from the cold war.
I wouldn't say that the US doesn't mind it. However, at this point it is a moot point - the US isn't in a position to reverse the current situation.
The current administration wasn't in power when Pakistan developed nuclear weapons. If it were US action would have been somewhat more likely. However, one issue is that the nuclear weapon escalation in that region started with India, and the US would have been unlikely to use military force against India - a democratic borderline-1st-world nation. At the time the US was offering substantial benefits to Pakistan if they did not test nuclear weapons in kind. However, having allowed India to test them the US really wasn't in a position to take a hard line with Pakistan. It certainly would have been possible though - I'm sure India would have allowed the staging of attacks from its soil. Contrary to general
2) Ability convince Venezuela and russia to stop taking dollars for oil thereby collapsing the value of the dollar.
Wouldn't be too sure on that one - those countries have alliances of convenience with Iran, and in fact are competitors on oil export. There really is no reason for them to think that they're next in line for a US invasion, and in fact they'll probably appreciate the hike in prices. Why tick off the US when it is better to just sell them more oil at far higher prices?
5) Ability to sink US and Israeli ships.
Doubtful. Any radar installation on the coast would be out of commission on the first night of the war. Ships need only stay out of range of fairly small land-launched missiles. The people launching them would not have any intel on the position of US warships. Missile attacks would be small in scale, so anti-missile defenses would have a shot at them. The Iranian air force would be a non-issue - just one more thing for the US air force to allocate forces to suppress, and therefore slow down bombing on the first few days, but they're not going to make any kind of coordinated attack on the US navy.
6) The ability to close the Persian gulf to all shipment of oil.
Questionable. They'd need intel on the location of ships to attack them, and if formed into convoys they could be protected against many forms of attack if given escorts. In fact, a move to blockade the gulf would in some sense increase US power - nobody is getting oil except via US protection, so the US can now choose who gets oil deliveries simply by refusing escort services to anyone else.
Russia doesn't need the oil and since china gets along with Iran and actually has dialog with them they can strike a deal at today's rates for an exclusive contract. All of Iran's oil goes to china at current market rates, the rest of the world pays through the nose, russia/Venezuela/Saudi-Arabia laugh all the way to the bank.
The fact is that the ground war would only last a week before the country enters a state not unlike that in Iraq - with the US holding control at national level while individual cities are in a state of anarchy. The US will be the only one in a position to dictate who gets oil shipments - although most likely supply will be greatly reduced from present levels. There won't be any other power in Iran for other nations to even negotiate with - the only non-US power will be resistance movements, terror cells, and opposition leaders with no real political control (but lots of influence over the masses). While these opposition forces can make life difficult for US forces, they don't actually have any control over oil distribution (other than to disrupt it).
And if the US did fight a long run-up air war and sensed that Iran was brokering deals with other partners, they would probably bomb a few pipelines and then nobody is getting oil except by sea (which the US controls).
How much is the happiness of Israel worth the rest of the world? Probably not that much. Nobody really likes them all that much anyway.
Well, in the US they actually have a fair amount of support. In the end it will probably come down to US interests though. If the US feels that a strongly-opposed nation with control of oil reserves needed for the US economy stands to gain nuclear weapons it is reasonably likely that the US will preemptively attack. The rest of the world doesn't really matter all that much as far as military power is concerned (the US does not need much support to occupy Iran), and for the most part they don't gain much from making a big stink out of the US invasion. No doubt there will be posturing, but little action. The posturing will likely occur whether the US invades or not (most nations that raise grips with US policy tend to do so across the board, and as a result the US isn't really counting on much support from them anyway). And, which is a better alliance of convenience - the US or Iran? China and Russia really don't have tha
CPUID isn't really trusted computing - if you have a program that checks the CPUID it is easy enough to bypass - just edit the executable and patch out the part that checks it. Or if you want to be really fancy run it in a VM and give it a bogus CPUID.
The idea of TPM is to prevent these sorts of attacks. The software will ask the TPM for its ID, and the hash of the boot sector. The TPM will reply with an SSL-signed response - so you can't tamper with it. You can only forge it if you have an SSL cert signed by somebody trusted by whoever is looking for your machine state. The software then asks the boot program for the hash of the OS kernel, and the OS kernel for the hash of the program itself. If any of those hashes aren't found in some online database, then some media vendor is going to refuse to send data to you. Potentially your ISP won't let you connect.
The problem with TPM is that you end up with a chip with an embedded private key that you don't know. That means that this chip can report on what is happening at a low level, and the only thing you can possibly do is just block it from working. Of course, no working chip, no internet for you (or DRM-ed media, or whatever).
Now, if the owner of the computer got a copy of the TPM keys installed within, it would be a great tool. I could tell my fileserver to disallow connections from hacked clients, for example. My kids PCs wouldn't run binaries that weren't signed by me. If somehow something did run my router would block it from all network communications. If I hold the keys to the kingdom (the TPM keys) then all this fancy hardware works for ME, and that is great. However, if I don't hold these keys then my hardware works for whoever does hold them.
So if Linux is useful for the desktop then it's fine, else I'll move to a different system.
I think the point of OSS is that if you feel that way, it is time to get coding, or testing, or documenting, or making wikis, or helping out on mail-lists, or whatever is that you do well. Linux will be useful on the desktop when contributers decide they want to make it that way.
If you don't want to contribute but just want a cheap OS that does what you want, then pay somebody to make an OS work the way you want it to work (doubt they'll be able to make it much cheaper than Windows/OSX/whatever).
What I hear a lot of people complaining about is the fact that people choose to donate code under licenses that make it very difficult to couple the code with proprietary software. What they don't get is that this is an intentional design decision on the part of those writing the code. And, since they're the ones donating their time, they're the ones who get to decide what terms their time is donated under. Many of these devs really don't care if anybody actually uses their software - at least not to a degree that they are willing to compromise their principles regarding proprietary software. If I held copyright to a chunk of an OSS project, and some vendor wanted me to relicense it so that they could use it in some bundled closed-source app, then I'd be happy to work something out, but it wouldn't be for free. If they want to make a buck on my labor, then they ought to pay for the right.
I guess what it comes down to is the fact that many OSS contributors don't really care that desperately if linux succeeds on the desktop - even those who make desktop-oriented software for it. Sure, they want to succeed, but only on their own terms - even if it means ultimately not succeeding except within the community.
Uh, these machines seem vulnerable to a number of attacks:
1. The program embedded in the machine could be altered. This would be undetectable as no record exists of how people actually voted other than that stored in RAM. Sure, the program is burned into the CPU, but who says somebody can't make their own CPUswith alternate programming?
2. The program in the tallying machine could be altered to record something other than what was actually stored on the voting machines. This could be detected if the individual machines are preserved for a recount - assuming they cannot be altered by the tally machine.
The whole reason people want paper ballots (whether as primary or secondary sources) is so that the voter gets to see the actual recorded vote on something that can be recounted. Plus, paper has the advantage of being understandable.
Machines are still valuable - they can prevent invalid votes from being cast which prevents the whole Florida fiasco. However, they are easy to tamper and it is hard to tell when this happens, so we need a way to audit them.
Agreed. The recount doesn't even need to be total - just a few percent if truly random would prevent fraud (assuming you nail people to the wall when they are caught). Auditing of important processes is routine in all industries - you'd think voting would just be common-sense.
The irony of corporate firewalls and email size limits is that when I had to send 100MB of data to another company I ended up doing so by FedExing a CD-R. Would have taken 1/10th the time and 1/10000th the cost via an FTP site, but how many non-IT companies have FTP sites? I figured my employer wouldn't appreciate it if I uploaded it to my webserver at home... :)
Really convincing evidence should show a clear increase before and after patents. I'm not necessarily talking about an increase in absolute numbers mind you.
:)
Much of your arguments are covered by and answered by the report. Basically it disagrees with you.
I thought you just got done telling me that the report did not cover evidence showing (or not showing) a clear increase before and after patents. Where is this covered in the report? I'd have assumed that if you already had this info you wouldn't have asked me to provide it.
As far as a report existing that disagrees with me, well I suppose I'll just have to live with that...
Actually, I believe that hot intergalactic gas is supposed to be the bulk of the baryonic matter in the universe. You are right that it is sparse (one electron for every 10m^2 or something like that). It is ionized as most of the gas probably fell into clusters from voids and has tremendous speeds - one collision later and the electron goes one way and the proton another. The mass ends up being huge as the volume is enormous.
The only thing that 'status quo' shows is that patents do not devastate the medical research completely. Really convincing evidence should show a clear increase before and after patents. I'm not necessarily talking about an increase in absolute numbers mind you.
:)
Considering that patents have been around in most lucrative markets long before drugs were developed, such evidence would be very difficult to obtain. How would you perform such an experiment short of abolishing patents? Just looking at single-country results is meaningless - nobody develops drugs with the goal of marketing them in Italy - they get sold there simply because once the costs are sunk you might as well sell them everywhere.
It is very clear that drugs don't get developed when there isn't a market for them. There are a number of clear examples. Just look at diseases that plague 3rd-world nations - they aren't rapidly cured as there is no money in it. If you get rid of patents the 1st-world nations are no different. Another example would be antibiotics - there are no new ones as nobody would pay premium patent-protected prices for some space-age antibiotic when penicillin does the job fine. However, all doctors would agree that we need more antibiotics. The only way they will show up is if governments fund R&D. If you get rid of patents you put every class of drugs in the same situation.
Basically the issue is that drug development costs money. It doesn't happen without heavy investment. Nobody invests money unless they are likely to get a return, unless they're a government agency or charity. Patents exist to generate this return. Without them you can certainly have publicly-funded R&D, but you won't have private investment. Maybe this works fine, but as I pointed out before you can have public funding of R&D without having to get rid of patents at all - ie have the best of both worlds.
Look at it like the FSF. They aren't out to ban proprietary software. They're out to compete with it and win. Now, software patents do interfere with this and they are a different beast since they tend to be general. Drug patents tend to be specific - the patent exists for a particular molecule. If you could get a patent for any drug that cures cancer I would agree that it is time to reform the system.
If there is a better way to develop drugs the solution is to just compete and win. ESR and Co didn't whine about MS Word - they wrote EMACS. Linus didn't whine about Windows - he wrote Linux. So, don't whine when chemists want to be paid to develop drugs - get out there and discover your own drugs, find volunteers to formulate them, find volunteers to test them out (good luck!), and make your own free drugs. Or, if you think you can afford to pay money for these activities without having patent protection on the final product then get a loan and try it.
The problem you'll run into is that while anybody with a $500 PC can write patches for linux, it takes a LOT more capital to outfit and run a lab, and good luck finding beta testers for your products...
It is tempting to take a solution that works well in one industry and apply it to others. The fact is that while I embrace free software and use it anywhere I can, it doesn't always work even in the software industry. To expect the idea to work everywhere is simplistic.
Let's not ASSUME that there is no way to harness it. Let's just say we haven't found the way to harvest it. The human race should never stop trying to do something, just because others believe it to not be possible.
Well, suffice it to say that without a substantial rewriting of the laws of physics there is no way to harness it.
If there is something seriously wrong with the laws of physics it is inevitable that we'll find it as we export ever more minute or large-scale phenomena. We don't need to spend needless time trying to find it in ordinary situations that have already been studied to death.
Uh, the Casimir effect (which I was describing) shows up in paragraph 3 of that article...
Sure, there is more to it than that, but this is the most practical example of vacuum energy that I could think of.
Vacuum energy is just a pressure on objects that are closeby in a vacuum, I believe. That in itself isn't enough to power anything, unless it is allowed to move the objects. That works, but eventually the objects collide and you can't get the energy source back without moving the objects back to their original positions, which requires all the energy you put in.
You need more than a force to generate power. You need a cycle.
Think of it another way - a 1 ton steel ball suspended over the earth has tremendous force acting on it, but there is no way to harvest it unless you allow it to fall. However, the source of energy goes away the second the ball hits the ground, since it takes all the energy you recovered to raise it back to its starting position.
Now, somebody might understand vacuum energy better than I, but that is how I see it...
Well, I agree that "practically free" is as good as free, but that isn't what is claimed by this company. They claim to be creating energy out of nothing, which is highly improbable.
Remember it onyl takes a tiny weak spark to get massive amounts of power out of gasoline. It just depends on what form that 'spark' comes in, and what form of 'gasoline' you're using.
Yes, but in this case the energy isn't coming from "nowhere" - it is coming from the gas and is depleted as the gas burns.
Most car AC units have an energy coefficiency of somewhere around 400% - for every one watt of power used four watts of heat are removed. So having greater than 100% isn't impossible.
Coefficient of performance is different from the efficiency of an engine. In fact, for a reversible engine I belive it is the inverse of its efficiency when operated in the opposite manner.
The coefficient of performance measures how much heat is moved for a given input of work. Efficiency measures how much work is performed for a given input of heat.
In the case of this proposed generation technique, it is given that no heat is input, and yet work is output. This would be an infinite efficiency, and a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. All engines leak some heat to a cold sink.
This is definitely a big part of poker. If I play somebody, and they only bet if they have AK, or similar, then any time I see them bet I'm going to fold in an instant, and in the rare cases that they get strong hands they won't get anywhere with them. On the other hand, I can bet when they probably have nothing and they'll cave in letting me rob the blinds. Now, if I play a strong player and bluff liberally I'll lose fast.
The important thing in poker is to not be readable. You need to vary your game.
This is the traditional problem with AI opponents - they can be easy to read, while not reading others. It can't just fold anything less than a straight flush every time I go all-in no matter what the pot-odds say. Otherwise it will get beat by trivial play.
There is a third philosophical position, which is agnostic but somewhat libertarian:whether or not you are for DRM, if people want to link DRM modules into your code it's none of your business.
And there is another position that you don't state. People can have all the DRM they want, but don't use my code to accomplish it. That is all the GPL v3 states. Tivo can use DRM if they want, but they'll have to write their own OS to do it, or buy one from somebody else. (Well, at least that would be the case if linux went GPLv3).
All the arguing over Torvolds/Stallman is silly. Linux can't go v3 even if it wanted to since the license wasn't made flexible from the start. The GPLv3 debate will be waged in other projects.
Well, the status quo would be one form of evidence - tons of drugs on the market and patents are currently allowed. Obviously it is hard to do experimentation without making it an all-or-nothing proposition.
Another piece of evidence is pediatric extensions. A recent law (well, that is in the last 20 years) allowed pharam companies to extend their drug patents if they did testing on pediatric formulations of their drugs. As a result almost all major drugs are tested for pediatric use. Before the law this was very rare - who is going to test cholesterol medication on children when the market is non-existant? However, the fact is that a small number of kids do need this medication and as a result of the patent extension the companies have incentive to perform the testing. If the patent extension wasn't needed it would have been done before, but it wasn't.
Rather than just abolishing drug patents, there is a middle-ground solution. You could just have the NIH fund drug research, defensively patenting the resulting compounds and licensing them for free use by anyone. Then after a few years or a decade you could see how well publicly-funded medicine works out in comparison to the pharma industry. Patients would have a selection of cheap public medicines and expensive private ones. If the public R&D works out well, then the private industry will dwindle and the patent issue becomes moot. If the public R&D effort becomes a boondoggle as libertarian-minded folks argue, then it will be obvious and we will still at least have the status quo. This is better than just abolishing patents and potentially decimating the entire drug industry, which would be slow to recover even if the laws were reversed (after all, investors will be shy to spend a lot if the public could just destroy their investments again in the future).
Correct - to clarify:
If you mount a truecrypt volume that contains a hidden volume and you don't specify the hidden volume passphrase then it just mounts the non-hidden volume. The non-hidden volume behaves as if it occupies the full space of the file/device it is contained in - if you write lots of data it will keep on writing right over the hidden volume, destroying it (without any way to tell this is happening). The only way to safely write to the outer volume is to mount it with the passwords to both volumes - which then lets it protect the data in the hidden volume when modifying the outer volume.