The title isn't suprising. With an agreed-upon standard, cable companies can charge more for HD-format programming and TV manufacturers can sell more units as everyone moves to the new systems. These parties have a lot to gain from getting together and working things out. But...
While the agreement outlines some copy-protection guidelines, it was drafted without the input of Hollywood or consumer groups, which have strong opinions and powerful friends in government.
The Hollywood crowd has a lot to loose if perfect copies of their works are easy to record, and the equipment becomes standard enough to get cheap. Given that people are pretty much accustomed to being able to record anything that comes down their cable, many more people are gonna notice when this stops working than noticed when a few Brittany Spears CD's stopped working in their computer drives. Get ready to watch an interesting fight when the MPAA and it's lobbyists are pit against the wrath of Joe Average when he finds out that his attempt to record Everyone Loves Raymond failed shortly after coughing up a good chunk of money for HD cable and a new set.
I think this is a victory for fair use.
Not yet, it's not... but since it'll put politicians in a tough spot between lobbyists and lost votes, it could become a victory if the MPAA gets too greedy with their restrictions.
On another loosly related topic, you can turn your answering machine into a device that removes your phone number from telemarketers lists, and it's free to boot. Basically, you put those tones you hear when you call a disconnected line at the beginning of your answering machine message. The auto-dialing computer that telemarketers use is often designed to recognize these sounds and mark the number as no longer in service. The system them removes your number from the list. Joy!
Define porn. That's the problem with ideas like a.porn or.xxx domain - who defines it?
Good point. First off, I'd reccomend not using the term.porn, but maybe something less stigmatizing like.mature or equivalent. This would let sites (like your nudism example, or sites like Dr. Drew that talk about sex) become easily filterable for parents, without requiring that they be pornography, per se. This way sites about nudism, paintings of nude people, etc., could make the switch without labeling themselves as something purient. Also, I don't think it needs to be required - while a few bad faith porno sites would keep their.com address, I'd imagine that most porn/adult topic sites would be happy to be able to avoid having children visit them without having to go through the hassle of verifying that every visitor is of age, just to reduce the number of angry moms who call them each day because junior downloaded something he wasn't supposed to see. Existing sites could just re-direct from their old domain for a while until everyone got used to the new setup - when hotsluts.com redirected the page to hotsluts.porn, the filter would kick in.
To my (limited) understanding, this version doesn't, but it brings up an interesting question: Could a future version set itself up to auto-load at startup and quietly look for a case when an audio CD was in the drive and a ripping program was running? Could it then quietly also wait a few minutes and then search the local drives for new.mp3 files, and report back to home base? Mebbe I'm getting out into conspiracy theory land here, but when my 'puter starts sending info out to lawsuit-happy companies, I tend to get a bit worried. Besides, if I can't get paranoid on/., where can I get paranoid?
As I remember, Google's ranking algorithm takes into account both the number of other sites that link to you AND the number of people who have historically clicked on a particular link for a given combination of search keywords. For example, a straight search for the keyphrase 'Monty Python' might bring up sites for both the British comedy group and sites about big snakes written by a guy named Monty Burns. Suppose for a second that both have an equal number of links, due to the popularity of the Brits in pop culture and a large number of scientific papers linked to the snake site. Google notes that more people are really looking for Eric Idle, et. al, than there are snake enthusiasts in the world and their engine learns to rank that page higher.
Given the fact that both the terms 'search' and 'king' are pretty common, it's not suprising that lots of sites come up. Since almost nobody has heard of SearchKing, most people are likely looking for something else (why the hell would ANYONE be looking for some fourth-string search engine if they already know about Google?). The higher number of clicks on the other sites will naturally raise their ranking above SearchKing, no evil plot on Google's part is needed.
If there is some sneaky stuff going on here, I think it'd have to be coming from SearchKing - anyone wanna bet that after the normal slashdotting dies down SearchKing has been clicked on enough to raise it's Google ranking?
You weren't the only one - I installed 8.2 (out of the box) and found that things didn't work right. I don't have a problem with things like the winmodem in my machine breaking - that's to be expected with a Linux distro and can be fixed after the install. But when gcc is broken from the get go, well, that's another story. Not to mention that I burned my ONE support email only to find out that you had to type some crappy patch command before the install to get an AMD processor to work - pretty basic stuff. I haven't tried 9.0 yet, but likely won't since I finally got 8.2 to a state that it's useful, and don't really feel like living without a working computer for another week while I burn patch CDs at work, fix problem X, and then find problem Y which needs yet another patch. end_rant
The whole idea behind patents, copyright, etc. was to empower individual inventors, scholars, and other creative people for the public good. Instead, current IP law empowers corporate non-persons (who are only people on paper) for private advantage, totally turning the original concept on its head.
Which part of 'promote science and the useful arts' implies that only individuals should be allowed to have access to patent protections? If this interpretation were used in law, the process of invention and intellectual progress as we know it today would come to a screeching halt. I have my name on several patents (with another one in the queue at the moment) and all of the IP was developed with the support and infrastructure of the University I attended as a graduate student and the corporation that I work at now. As a result of their funding the development of my work, they get to have control over the patent (I am listed as an inventor, it is assigned (owned) by them). This arangement gives me the support I need to do the work and gives them the ability to try to recoup that investment by selling/licenscing what I produce. I even have incentive to keep working (beyond the steady paycheck) in that I get a cut of the royalty/profit made off these works.
Suppose we took your interpretation of how the IP system should work - I couldn't get a job because I'd own my work entirely, the company I work at would not have the benefit of my work, and the public at large would not have the benefit of either my work or the physical implementation of my work in the form of a product. For big-ticket items (I work in semiconductors) almost no private individual would be able to contribute usefully to the world because we couldn't afford the equipment or time to set up our own facility. About the only kind of IP that could still be reasonably produced would be works of literature since most people can afford to buy the pencil and paper needed to produce it. Sounds like a pretty bad way to run things to me.
The purpose of copyright (and patent) laws isn't to spread new ideas--that goal would be done much easier if it was simply illegal to hide an idea.
I disagree. The purpose of copyright/patent law is the spread of ideas. If I write or invent something today, it's in the public interest that I release it in some form so that it can spread and act as a seed for future works.
Copyrights (and patents, but not trademarks) exist so the creators of new ideas / written works CAN make money, and thus are encouraged to keep on making new things.
OK, that's true. If I invented something today, and couldn't have any assurance of recouping my investment of time and money that wen into making the invention, I would have little to no incentive to keep working on a project.
The purpose of IP protection is to make sure that inventors are able to gain a temporary advantage while at the same time allowing/forcing them to release the work to the public in some form. I think we could all agree on that, but it misses the point of the article which is that at some point the IP protection has to end otherwise the ability of a work to be put to good use by society is ruined and IP law becomes a tool to fragment the intellectal output of our society's best thinkers into a handful of warring camps dominated by a few large companies. While there is always going to be a debate going on as to exactally how long this protection period should be, I think the author of the article was trying to point out that ex post facto extensions of copyright protections for works that have already had time to pay back their originators only serve to protect the interests of a limited group of IP holders at the expense of the rest of us. This wasn't how the system was intended to work by the founding fathers, and isn't how it should work today.
I pretty much agree with you - it seems like merely OK posts that get a +1 of some type zoom up to the top while a lot of other, sometimes equally worthy stuff wanders like a zombie in the unmoderated tundra. (apologies for that last analogy)
I have moderator points today and the combination of that with what I read in your post gave me a thought about what might be going on, which is that it's really takes a bit of work to moderate well. I love the moderation system on the whole - compared to other sites the signal to noise ratio here is pretty good. Still, as a moderator it's kind of your duty to wade through hundreds of 'noise' posts to pick out the few 'signals' hidden deep down in the stack. I think the problem is that with so many posts appearing as the number of users go up, it becomes tempting for even well-meaning moderators to start their read of a topic at about a +2 level and just up the posts that seem interesting from that already picked-over list. This leads to the moderator inflation that you noted.
So what's the solution? I dunno, really. I liked the idea that foxtrot brought up about costing more points to mod up a +4 to +5 than modding a +1 to a +2. Another solution might be to only let some number of moderators view a post before
it 'times out' and the score becomes fixed forever. Either way, a mod could keep their attention on the new stuff more and the urge to just up decent posts to great because it takes less time would be reduced
Sorry to perpetuate this clearly offtopic thread, but I felt that it's a more important subject for the future good of/. to discuss than the Cringley stuff. I'd have been happy to post it somewhere else, but as somebody already mentioned, there's no place to directly discuss things about/. here on/.
OK, I'll shut up and take my -1 Offtopic whipping like a man now.
2. unless such person or entity has instituted procedures for maintaining a list of persons who do not wish to receive telephone solicitations made by or on behalf of that person or entity.
I've been noticing a new tactic used by telemarketers here in sunny Wisconsin. Upon asking to be added to the DNC list, the person on the other end rapidly spits out something to the effect of "You need to call our DNC list management group at 1-800-555-1212" and then hangs up before I can ask for the number again to write it down. I 'spose it technically meets the rule, but effectively I can't get on the list unless I can remember a 7 digit random number that I heard one time quickly long enough to get to a pen and paper. Jerks.
It sounds as though the judge had a good grasp of the technology...
Hmmmmm... I wonder how the judge came to understand the ins and outs of filesharing so well. It couldn't be the same way the rest of the world learned about it, could it? *cough*
Well, I'm sure the judge won't mind if Jack V. and co. do a little checking around on his hard drive, and maybe take a look at any logs or history files showing where he's been to on the 'net. After all, it is their God-given right to do so, no?
.. finding something new to base a story on. A bit ago, I noticed that after 14ish years the Simpsons had more or less covered every major (and most minor) memes in American culture. Think about it: Lack of diversity in policics? The John Jackson vs. Jack Johnson election. Drug legalization? Homer & Otto get stoned, "They call them fingers, but I've never seen them fing... Oh, wait. There they go." Crappy sitcoms? "See ya in a couple of seasons, Roy." Superflous third nipples? Krusty has one. You get the point.
About the only things a movie format has to offer that can't be done in a TV show are (1) swearing, which really only means a half-dozen or so new words since the show really pushed the boundaries out in this area in the early 90's, (2) Nudity, which in cartoon form doesn't seem that popular outside of Japan, and (3) A longer format, which is dubious since they can always split an episode into two parts. None of this seems to really offer much in the way of new ground for them to cover.
Sooo... I think the best we can hope for is a long version of a TV series episode, maybe with a bit more time spent in the writing phase than your typical TV studio allows. But given the string of crappy movies that have been out in the last few years, I guess the whole thing isn't really all that bad. I'll see it - especially if there's a Futurama short at the beginning.
Why? Couldn't you put it in a glass ball or something rather than a standard PGA type chip? A non-conductive oil bath maybe?
Having non-conductive stuff surrounding your chip is the wrong way to go - you really want to have something that conducts electricity. Static is caused by the buildup of electrical charges that don't have anywhere to go. If you get enough of them, and if they happen to be in some inconvienent place such as on the gate of a transistor that isn't electrically well connected to anything (because, say the next transistor up the line that controls this one happens to be turned off), the charges can break through the insulating layers between the transistor gate and the substrate of the chip (substrate -> the big hunk of silicon or whatever that the transistor is built on). This can cause catastrophic damage to the transistor gate, and then the chip don't work no more.
It takes much more charge to break down a transistor gate than it does to simply turn it on, so the trick is to cover it in something that conducts well enough to bleed off excess (i.e. static) charge, but not so well that it shorts out the device. Add to that the fact that the material needs to be a good thermal condutor, not contaminate the chip with anything that messes up the semiconductor chemistry, etc., and it becomes a pretty tricky materials problem.
At work (I make chips) we have condutive floors, conductive rubber pads for people to work on, and anyone who handles the chips needs to have a grounding strap on. We also sometimes use air ionizers in regions where chips are exposed so that the air itself becomes somewhat conducting. When I think about how much more sensitive a modern processor is than the devices I work with, it's amazing to me that they work at all by the time they make it to the average user's home.
I would scream it from the rooftops if I felt it would do any good: CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM! [snip]I, for one, reject the notion that spending money is covered by the First Amendment. Speech is saying something. Spending money is buying something.
I agree with you on the idea that a strong version of CFR could be a good thing - say a $1,000 limit (with inflation adjustments for the future) from any one source, limitations on what services can be donated by outside groups, and blocking of 'forced' donations by members of labor unions, etc. However, I don't agree with the idea that spending money isn't a form of political expression. If I give $50 to the 'Wont Somebody Please Think of the Children' foundation, I'm essentially saying that I buy into their ideas and want to support a group that is working on pusing those ideas. These groups then attempt to convince politicians to vote the way I want them to, just as opposing groups are trying to influence the same politicians to vote the other way. If such a group can form a powerful lobbying campaign funded by many small donations from equally many freely-acting interests, then I think that's just about as close to the essence of democracy as you can get.
On the other end of the spectrum we can see the bad side of the lobbying issue. A few very large donations funding lobbying efforts that overpower the smaller grass-roots efforts focuses power into the hands of those who have the money to make such contributions. This is the kind of behavior that a good CFR should work against.
If you can accept the above arguments, you have to think about the merit of some of the types of CFR that have been proposed in which campaigns would be entirely (or even partly) financed by the State. To me, this would put the power to fund any individual politican in the hands of the current political groups, and work to eliminate the expression of polical beliefs by average folks as they would otherwise choose to express it through donations. Instead, we'd have a situation where those who control the money would work to change the rules of the game to benifit their side, regardless of the wishes to the people.
I realize that the original post didn't specify that the CFR in question would go so far as to have government-sourced funding only, but that kind of thing has been put forward at times, and I decided to bring it up just to point out that anything called a CFR shouldn't automatically be assumed to be a good thing.
I mentioned in my post that the electric field (which is closely associated with voltage, i.e. the 1's and 0's of the digital world) moves quickly, not the electrons themselves. This is why we get fast pings from slow electrons. The _average_ speed of any individual electron is pretty slow. It depends on the strength of the electric field it's in, the cross-sectional area of the wire it's in, the number of mobile charge carriers, etc., but it's still nowhere near light speed. Here's a little backup info:
As you can see, the speed they give varies between a few mm/sec and a few m/s. This basically depends on what assumptions you make when setting up the calculation. A few cm/sec is just a handy order of magnitude estimate.
There was an article about an outfit called Cloudmark SpamNet in last month's Wired magazine. Basically, the idea is that you install a bit of code that generates a fingerprint of each incomming message and then monitors your use to see if you bother reading it or just delete it instantly. If you delete it right away the program send the fingerprint back to their home server, and once some statistically significant number of deletions shows up with a common fingerprint that message is marked as spam. Every once in a while the home server then sends a message back to the client program with all of that day's identified spam-mails so that the client can delete those messages without downloading. I haven't tried it myself, but they are claiming a 90% kill rate.
Another interesting part is that the only email client that they have working code for is MS Outlook, so I guess in a way Microsoft really is playing a part in killing spam just like some in this thread had hoped.
>50 years after Einstein, and people still don't realise that the electrons in a piece of copper wire travel at the speed of light?
I'll admit that I didn't do the math to re-check this, but I seem to remember the velocity of electrons in copper wire being on the order of a few cm/second - much less than the speed of light. The confusion my be coming from the fact that when you stick an extra electron in the end of an otherwise neutrally charged wire, the spare charge sets up an electrical field that pushes a different electron out the other end (assuming it's grounded or generally has another place to go to). It's the electrical field that travels at the speed of light, not the electrons themselves.
>In fact, as light in fibre optic cabling bounces off the insides of the plastic tubing, it takes a less direct route and thus technically has a _higher_ latency than copper wire.
Ummm.. not quite. It's true that the light bounces around inside the fiber, but due to the low index difference between the core of the fiber and it's surrounding cladding the angle of the bounce is pretty small and wouldn't really increase the distance the light needs to travel The distance increase is proportional to 1/cos[angle] so when the angle is near zero, cos[angle] is near 1 and 1/cos[angle] is pretty near 1 meaning no big change in the distance traveled by Joe Photon. For electrical wires, speed is limited by the capacitance/inductance ratio of the cable and is typically around 2-3 times slower than free-space light.
All in all, it's a good thing that electrons don't go the speed of light in our house wiring - I used to work with a synchrotron, which is a device that gets the electrons moving at relativistic speeds, and whenever the beam of elecrons went around a corner it produced enough X-rays due to the angular acceleration to flash-fry a horse. Be glad that copper wire electrons are slow, since if they were fast we'd get cooked every time a bit of house wiring was anything less than perfectly straight.
We've all heard talk of over-built data networks and "dark fiber". What interests me is how this apparent over-capacity does not seem to match up the price of bandwidth and the apparent bandwidth management of consumer-level heavy users.
You have to be careful when you try to compare 'dark fiber' to data-carrying capacity that you can use right at this minute. When the boom was on and people were laying tons of fiber, some accountant somewhere noticed that while the fiber itself was pretty cheap it cost a lot of money to dig a ditch to lay it in. Therefore, companies decided that as long as they were digging the ditch they may as well lay a couple of hundred fibers into it, but only hook transmitters and regenerators (the little lasers that send the 1's and 0's down the fiber) to as many lines as they needed at the time. The logic was that when the internet doubled in size (in 100 days, right?) you could just add the transmitters at the ends of the extra fiber lines as needed.
The problem of course was that the internet wasn't doubling every 100 days, so there was a lot of excess fiber that never had transmitting lasers hooked up (hence the term 'dark'). This excess capacity is still available, however right now companies are hurting so bad for cash that they aren't able to afford too many transmitter or regenerator lasers so the excess capacity is getting used slowly. Basically, when you want to increase bandwidth on one of these lines today you have to pay for the transmitter/reciever/regenerator equipment up front, and this keeps the cost of bandwidth up.
Q:How can voters be expected to trust a voting mechanism when there is no accountability?
A:They shouldn't
Having a company 'guarantee' that it's voting machines are working sets up an entirely wrong set of incentives. To illustrate this a bit, suppse you work at VotingMachines Inc., it's the day after an election, and you find a bug in the code that could have affected the results. Assuming nobody else has ever been allowed to see the code, is it in your best interest to (A) quietly fix the bug for next time and not say anything, or (B) go public with the problem and have CNN show up on your doorstep the next day asking why your products suck so much and why anyone should ever buy one again. Ideally, people would be honest and go public, but realistically, we've all been in situations where we've had to make this kind of choice (OK, maybe not at this magnitude of importance) and have at least felt tempted to go the quiet route
Contrast this situation to the case of an open system. As a programmer for this kind of machine, your incentive is to fix bugs as soon as they are found and it would be impossible to hide the fact that a bug may have skewed the vote. Also, it would be possible to figure out if any given bug would have been likely to actually affect the vote count significantly enough to change the result of the election.
In my mind at least, it's clear that the open system sets a much stronger standard for public trust in the system, and given that vote fraud has been going on as long as people have been voting, ensuring that the public can trust a given voting system is as important a part of democratic action as the vote itself.
Arg. No kidding. When you look at the millions some of these places have burned thru, and what they got for it, it makes you think that the management went to the South Park Underwear Gnome School of Business:
Step 1: Steal underwear (Or put up a website)
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit! (or IPO, which ever comes first)
Umm... Did the guys at Nature understand this?
on
Printing Chips
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· Score: 3, Informative
There's an article in the current Scientific American (pg. 34 of the July 2002 issue) that covers this topic, but the description of the technique makes a lot more sense that the version covered in Nature (just a guess - Nature's writer didn't have a background in the subject).
Nature's article stated that a laser was used to 'liquify' silicon and then the quartz mask was pressed into the resulting mush. This doesn't make sense because (a) heat is something you dont want when doing fine patterning - thermal expansion tends to cause everything to shift by microns, and you want to work with nanometers. (b) Melting silicon and then quickly re-cooling it tends to destroy the crystal structure which is needed for semiconductors to work. Making a single Si crystal requires long, SLOW cooling. (c) Even if the previous items could be overcome, so what? Pressing a pattern into liquid Si and then cooling it gives you lumpy silicon - not a transistor. Transistors are made by putting small amounts of impurities (Phosphorus and Arsenic mostly) into the Si which changes the conductivity and the dominant charge carriers.
Sooo... Assuming that Nature really boned this one up, here's how the Scientific American version works: A thin layer of polymer (like a photoresist) is spread over the wafer, then the mask is carefuly aligned to any existing structures and placed in contact with the wafer/polymer combo. The laser is then used to cause a photochemical reaction that hardens the polymer in places where it isn't protected by the mask. The remaining soft polymer is then removed (I'm guessing there's a solvent step here - so much for the no chemical use idea) and the result is the pattern of whatever you're trying to make left in the hardened polymer. From here, you can etch, implant, or whatever other normal Si processing step you want. The main difference seems to be that the contact mask in the new process and the thin polymer layers give a higher resolution.
If anyone has more specific info or a link to a technical paper, please post it. Right now it appears that we have two major science magazines in conflict, and from my experience (I once had to build a mask generator in grad school - amazing what you can do with LabView and some old photography equipment) the SciAm version makes a heck of a lot more sense.
I'm sure you're right about MS being in this for the long term - you don't need to be much of a history buff to notice that they have been more than willing to eat an upfront cost for a time while they gain a stranglehold on a technology and then when 90% market share has been achieved they begin the heavy cash cow milking.
I'd guess that deep inside the neurons in BillyG's head the fantasy goes like this: Lose some money on the initial sale, get some of it back from software royalties, build your own 'internet', gain market share, release XBox2.0, gain more market share, get back more from royalties (of course, at increased rates your bigger installed base lets you command), and finally add new revenue streams by making anyone who wants to play HALO online pony up a $10 per month access fee for the only network that the unmodded XBox will connect to. (Damn, that was a long sentence.)
So in the end, Dave's right - it comes down to either breaking the model early with mods that don't pay Redmond or waiting 5 years until MS controls the console gaming universe and we gotta cough up monthly fees or go outside and get a life. Assuming, of course, that Nintendo/PS/whatever doesn't interfere too much wiht the 'gain more market share' parts. Should be an intersting thing to watch...
I can't remember exactly where I read this, but I read that the XBox business model was set up such that MS actually loses money every time they sell a unit. They plan to make the cash back via a license fee attached to all games sold by major developers. For example, if they sell for $50 under cost initally, then get $10 for every title you buy they are in the black as of the 6th game you purchase.
Now think of what happens if someone MAMEs the XBox, mods it to be a cheap PC, or otherwise does something that causes the user to treat it as something other than a dedicated system for 'legal' gaming. In this case MS is just paying part of your equipment costs and not getting the return they expected. Modding the XBox to be a Linux machine just adds insult to injury in their eyes.
I think this answers some of the questions brought up in posts where people wonder why MS is fighting this kind of use. I'd expect MS to continue to fight this one tooth and nail, and with their history you know they will.
P.S. I did a (very cursory) google search to try to find the article outlining how the XBox business model works - if anyone knows where to find it and could post it in a reply it'd be cool.
Slashdot Mirror
The title isn't suprising. With an agreed-upon standard, cable companies can charge more for HD-format programming and TV manufacturers can sell more units as everyone moves to the new systems. These parties have a lot to gain from getting together and working things out. But...
While the agreement outlines some copy-protection guidelines, it was drafted without the input of Hollywood or consumer groups, which have strong opinions and powerful friends in government.
The Hollywood crowd has a lot to loose if perfect copies of their works are easy to record, and the equipment becomes standard enough to get cheap. Given that people are pretty much accustomed to being able to record anything that comes down their cable, many more people are gonna notice when this stops working than noticed when a few Brittany Spears CD's stopped working in their computer drives. Get ready to watch an interesting fight when the MPAA and it's lobbyists are pit against the wrath of Joe Average when he finds out that his attempt to record Everyone Loves Raymond failed shortly after coughing up a good chunk of money for HD cable and a new set.
I think this is a victory for fair use.
Not yet, it's not... but since it'll put politicians in a tough spot between lobbyists and lost votes, it could become a victory if the MPAA gets too greedy with their restrictions.
Good point. First off, I'd reccomend not using the term .porn, but maybe something less stigmatizing like .mature or equivalent. This would let sites (like your nudism example, or sites like Dr. Drew that talk about sex) become easily filterable for parents, without requiring that they be pornography, per se. This way sites about nudism, paintings of nude people, etc., could make the switch without labeling themselves as something purient. Also, I don't think it needs to be required - while a few bad faith porno sites would keep their .com address, I'd imagine that most porn/adult topic sites would be happy to be able to avoid having children visit them without having to go through the hassle of verifying that every visitor is of age, just to reduce the number of angry moms who call them each day because junior downloaded something he wasn't supposed to see. Existing sites could just re-direct from their old domain for a while until everyone got used to the new setup - when hotsluts.com redirected the page to hotsluts.porn, the filter would kick in.
Given the fact that both the terms 'search' and 'king' are pretty common, it's not suprising that lots of sites come up. Since almost nobody has heard of SearchKing, most people are likely looking for something else (why the hell would ANYONE be looking for some fourth-string search engine if they already know about Google?). The higher number of clicks on the other sites will naturally raise their ranking above SearchKing, no evil plot on Google's part is needed.
If there is some sneaky stuff going on here, I think it'd have to be coming from SearchKing - anyone wanna bet that after the normal slashdotting dies down SearchKing has been clicked on enough to raise it's Google ranking?
You weren't the only one - I installed 8.2 (out of the box) and found that things didn't work right. I don't have a problem with things like the winmodem in my machine breaking - that's to be expected with a Linux distro and can be fixed after the install. But when gcc is broken from the get go, well, that's another story. Not to mention that I burned my ONE support email only to find out that you had to type some crappy patch command before the install to get an AMD processor to work - pretty basic stuff. I haven't tried 9.0 yet, but likely won't since I finally got 8.2 to a state that it's useful, and don't really feel like living without a working computer for another week while I burn patch CDs at work, fix problem X, and then find problem Y which needs yet another patch. end_rant
Which part of 'promote science and the useful arts' implies that only individuals should be allowed to have access to patent protections? If this interpretation were used in law, the process of invention and intellectual progress as we know it today would come to a screeching halt. I have my name on several patents (with another one in the queue at the moment) and all of the IP was developed with the support and infrastructure of the University I attended as a graduate student and the corporation that I work at now. As a result of their funding the development of my work, they get to have control over the patent (I am listed as an inventor, it is assigned (owned) by them). This arangement gives me the support I need to do the work and gives them the ability to try to recoup that investment by selling/licenscing what I produce. I even have incentive to keep working (beyond the steady paycheck) in that I get a cut of the royalty/profit made off these works.
Suppose we took your interpretation of how the IP system should work - I couldn't get a job because I'd own my work entirely, the company I work at would not have the benefit of my work, and the public at large would not have the benefit of either my work or the physical implementation of my work in the form of a product. For big-ticket items (I work in semiconductors) almost no private individual would be able to contribute usefully to the world because we couldn't afford the equipment or time to set up our own facility. About the only kind of IP that could still be reasonably produced would be works of literature since most people can afford to buy the pencil and paper needed to produce it. Sounds like a pretty bad way to run things to me.
I disagree. The purpose of copyright/patent law is the spread of ideas. If I write or invent something today, it's in the public interest that I release it in some form so that it can spread and act as a seed for future works.
Copyrights (and patents, but not trademarks) exist so the creators of new ideas / written works CAN make money, and thus are encouraged to keep on making new things.
OK, that's true. If I invented something today, and couldn't have any assurance of recouping my investment of time and money that wen into making the invention, I would have little to no incentive to keep working on a project.
The purpose of IP protection is to make sure that inventors are able to gain a temporary advantage while at the same time allowing/forcing them to release the work to the public in some form. I think we could all agree on that, but it misses the point of the article which is that at some point the IP protection has to end otherwise the ability of a work to be put to good use by society is ruined and IP law becomes a tool to fragment the intellectal output of our society's best thinkers into a handful of warring camps dominated by a few large companies. While there is always going to be a debate going on as to exactally how long this protection period should be, I think the author of the article was trying to point out that ex post facto extensions of copyright protections for works that have already had time to pay back their originators only serve to protect the interests of a limited group of IP holders at the expense of the rest of us. This wasn't how the system was intended to work by the founding fathers, and isn't how it should work today.
I have moderator points today and the combination of that with what I read in your post gave me a thought about what might be going on, which is that it's really takes a bit of work to moderate well. I love the moderation system on the whole - compared to other sites the signal to noise ratio here is pretty good. Still, as a moderator it's kind of your duty to wade through hundreds of 'noise' posts to pick out the few 'signals' hidden deep down in the stack. I think the problem is that with so many posts appearing as the number of users go up, it becomes tempting for even well-meaning moderators to start their read of a topic at about a +2 level and just up the posts that seem interesting from that already picked-over list. This leads to the moderator inflation that you noted.
So what's the solution? I dunno, really. I liked the idea that foxtrot brought up about costing more points to mod up a +4 to +5 than modding a +1 to a +2. Another solution might be to only let some number of moderators view a post before it 'times out' and the score becomes fixed forever. Either way, a mod could keep their attention on the new stuff more and the urge to just up decent posts to great because it takes less time would be reduced
Sorry to perpetuate this clearly offtopic thread, but I felt that it's a more important subject for the future good of /. to discuss than the Cringley stuff. I'd have been happy to post it somewhere else, but as somebody already mentioned, there's no place to directly discuss things about /. here on /.
OK, I'll shut up and take my -1 Offtopic whipping like a man now.
I've been noticing a new tactic used by telemarketers here in sunny Wisconsin. Upon asking to be added to the DNC list, the person on the other end rapidly spits out something to the effect of "You need to call our DNC list management group at 1-800-555-1212" and then hangs up before I can ask for the number again to write it down. I 'spose it technically meets the rule, but effectively I can't get on the list unless I can remember a 7 digit random number that I heard one time quickly long enough to get to a pen and paper. Jerks.
Hmmmmm... I wonder how the judge came to understand the ins and outs of filesharing so well. It couldn't be the same way the rest of the world learned about it, could it? *cough*
Well, I'm sure the judge won't mind if Jack V. and co. do a little checking around on his hard drive, and maybe take a look at any logs or history files showing where he's been to on the 'net. After all, it is their God-given right to do so, no?
About the only things a movie format has to offer that can't be done in a TV show are (1) swearing, which really only means a half-dozen or so new words since the show really pushed the boundaries out in this area in the early 90's, (2) Nudity, which in cartoon form doesn't seem that popular outside of Japan, and (3) A longer format, which is dubious since they can always split an episode into two parts. None of this seems to really offer much in the way of new ground for them to cover.
Sooo... I think the best we can hope for is a long version of a TV series episode, maybe with a bit more time spent in the writing phase than your typical TV studio allows. But given the string of crappy movies that have been out in the last few years, I guess the whole thing isn't really all that bad. I'll see it - especially if there's a Futurama short at the beginning.
Having non-conductive stuff surrounding your chip is the wrong way to go - you really want to have something that conducts electricity. Static is caused by the buildup of electrical charges that don't have anywhere to go. If you get enough of them, and if they happen to be in some inconvienent place such as on the gate of a transistor that isn't electrically well connected to anything (because, say the next transistor up the line that controls this one happens to be turned off), the charges can break through the insulating layers between the transistor gate and the substrate of the chip (substrate -> the big hunk of silicon or whatever that the transistor is built on). This can cause catastrophic damage to the transistor gate, and then the chip don't work no more.
It takes much more charge to break down a transistor gate than it does to simply turn it on, so the trick is to cover it in something that conducts well enough to bleed off excess (i.e. static) charge, but not so well that it shorts out the device. Add to that the fact that the material needs to be a good thermal condutor, not contaminate the chip with anything that messes up the semiconductor chemistry, etc., and it becomes a pretty tricky materials problem.
At work (I make chips) we have condutive floors, conductive rubber pads for people to work on, and anyone who handles the chips needs to have a grounding strap on. We also sometimes use air ionizers in regions where chips are exposed so that the air itself becomes somewhat conducting. When I think about how much more sensitive a modern processor is than the devices I work with, it's amazing to me that they work at all by the time they make it to the average user's home.
I agree with you on the idea that a strong version of CFR could be a good thing - say a $1,000 limit (with inflation adjustments for the future) from any one source, limitations on what services can be donated by outside groups, and blocking of 'forced' donations by members of labor unions, etc. However, I don't agree with the idea that spending money isn't a form of political expression. If I give $50 to the 'Wont Somebody Please Think of the Children' foundation, I'm essentially saying that I buy into their ideas and want to support a group that is working on pusing those ideas. These groups then attempt to convince politicians to vote the way I want them to, just as opposing groups are trying to influence the same politicians to vote the other way. If such a group can form a powerful lobbying campaign funded by many small donations from equally many freely-acting interests, then I think that's just about as close to the essence of democracy as you can get.
On the other end of the spectrum we can see the bad side of the lobbying issue. A few very large donations funding lobbying efforts that overpower the smaller grass-roots efforts focuses power into the hands of those who have the money to make such contributions. This is the kind of behavior that a good CFR should work against.
If you can accept the above arguments, you have to think about the merit of some of the types of CFR that have been proposed in which campaigns would be entirely (or even partly) financed by the State. To me, this would put the power to fund any individual politican in the hands of the current political groups, and work to eliminate the expression of polical beliefs by average folks as they would otherwise choose to express it through donations. Instead, we'd have a situation where those who control the money would work to change the rules of the game to benifit their side, regardless of the wishes to the people.
I realize that the original post didn't specify that the CFR in question would go so far as to have government-sourced funding only, but that kind of thing has been put forward at times, and I decided to bring it up just to point out that anything called a CFR shouldn't automatically be assumed to be a good thing.
Some guy at sciencenet
Dept. of Energy's Ask a Scientist
As you can see, the speed they give varies between a few mm/sec and a few m/s. This basically depends on what assumptions you make when setting up the calculation. A few cm/sec is just a handy order of magnitude estimate.
Another interesting part is that the only email client that they have working code for is MS Outlook, so I guess in a way Microsoft really is playing a part in killing spam just like some in this thread had hoped.
I'll admit that I didn't do the math to re-check this, but I seem to remember the velocity of electrons in copper wire being on the order of a few cm/second - much less than the speed of light. The confusion my be coming from the fact that when you stick an extra electron in the end of an otherwise neutrally charged wire, the spare charge sets up an electrical field that pushes a different electron out the other end (assuming it's grounded or generally has another place to go to). It's the electrical field that travels at the speed of light, not the electrons themselves.
>In fact, as light in fibre optic cabling bounces off the insides of the plastic tubing, it takes a less direct route and thus technically has a _higher_ latency than copper wire.
Ummm.. not quite. It's true that the light bounces around inside the fiber, but due to the low index difference between the core of the fiber and it's surrounding cladding the angle of the bounce is pretty small and wouldn't really increase the distance the light needs to travel The distance increase is proportional to 1/cos[angle] so when the angle is near zero, cos[angle] is near 1 and 1/cos[angle] is pretty near 1 meaning no big change in the distance traveled by Joe Photon. For electrical wires, speed is limited by the capacitance/inductance ratio of the cable and is typically around 2-3 times slower than free-space light.
All in all, it's a good thing that electrons don't go the speed of light in our house wiring - I used to work with a synchrotron, which is a device that gets the electrons moving at relativistic speeds, and whenever the beam of elecrons went around a corner it produced enough X-rays due to the angular acceleration to flash-fry a horse. Be glad that copper wire electrons are slow, since if they were fast we'd get cooked every time a bit of house wiring was anything less than perfectly straight.
You have to be careful when you try to compare 'dark fiber' to data-carrying capacity that you can use right at this minute. When the boom was on and people were laying tons of fiber, some accountant somewhere noticed that while the fiber itself was pretty cheap it cost a lot of money to dig a ditch to lay it in. Therefore, companies decided that as long as they were digging the ditch they may as well lay a couple of hundred fibers into it, but only hook transmitters and regenerators (the little lasers that send the 1's and 0's down the fiber) to as many lines as they needed at the time. The logic was that when the internet doubled in size (in 100 days, right?) you could just add the transmitters at the ends of the extra fiber lines as needed.
The problem of course was that the internet wasn't doubling every 100 days, so there was a lot of excess fiber that never had transmitting lasers hooked up (hence the term 'dark'). This excess capacity is still available, however right now companies are hurting so bad for cash that they aren't able to afford too many transmitter or regenerator lasers so the excess capacity is getting used slowly. Basically, when you want to increase bandwidth on one of these lines today you have to pay for the transmitter/reciever/regenerator equipment up front, and this keeps the cost of bandwidth up.
A:They shouldn't
Having a company 'guarantee' that it's voting machines are working sets up an entirely wrong set of incentives. To illustrate this a bit, suppse you work at VotingMachines Inc., it's the day after an election, and you find a bug in the code that could have affected the results. Assuming nobody else has ever been allowed to see the code, is it in your best interest to (A) quietly fix the bug for next time and not say anything, or (B) go public with the problem and have CNN show up on your doorstep the next day asking why your products suck so much and why anyone should ever buy one again. Ideally, people would be honest and go public, but realistically, we've all been in situations where we've had to make this kind of choice (OK, maybe not at this magnitude of importance) and have at least felt tempted to go the quiet route
Contrast this situation to the case of an open system. As a programmer for this kind of machine, your incentive is to fix bugs as soon as they are found and it would be impossible to hide the fact that a bug may have skewed the vote. Also, it would be possible to figure out if any given bug would have been likely to actually affect the vote count significantly enough to change the result of the election.
In my mind at least, it's clear that the open system sets a much stronger standard for public trust in the system, and given that vote fraud has been going on as long as people have been voting, ensuring that the public can trust a given voting system is as important a part of democratic action as the vote itself.
Step 1: Steal underwear (Or put up a website)
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit! (or IPO, which ever comes first)
Nature's article stated that a laser was used to 'liquify' silicon and then the quartz mask was pressed into the resulting mush. This doesn't make sense because (a) heat is something you dont want when doing fine patterning - thermal expansion tends to cause everything to shift by microns, and you want to work with nanometers. (b) Melting silicon and then quickly re-cooling it tends to destroy the crystal structure which is needed for semiconductors to work. Making a single Si crystal requires long, SLOW cooling. (c) Even if the previous items could be overcome, so what? Pressing a pattern into liquid Si and then cooling it gives you lumpy silicon - not a transistor. Transistors are made by putting small amounts of impurities (Phosphorus and Arsenic mostly) into the Si which changes the conductivity and the dominant charge carriers.
Sooo... Assuming that Nature really boned this one up, here's how the Scientific American version works: A thin layer of polymer (like a photoresist) is spread over the wafer, then the mask is carefuly aligned to any existing structures and placed in contact with the wafer/polymer combo. The laser is then used to cause a photochemical reaction that hardens the polymer in places where it isn't protected by the mask. The remaining soft polymer is then removed (I'm guessing there's a solvent step here - so much for the no chemical use idea) and the result is the pattern of whatever you're trying to make left in the hardened polymer. From here, you can etch, implant, or whatever other normal Si processing step you want. The main difference seems to be that the contact mask in the new process and the thin polymer layers give a higher resolution.
If anyone has more specific info or a link to a technical paper, please post it. Right now it appears that we have two major science magazines in conflict, and from my experience (I once had to build a mask generator in grad school - amazing what you can do with LabView and some old photography equipment) the SciAm version makes a heck of a lot more sense.
I'd guess that deep inside the neurons in BillyG's head the fantasy goes like this: Lose some money on the initial sale, get some of it back from software royalties, build your own 'internet', gain market share, release XBox2.0, gain more market share, get back more from royalties (of course, at increased rates your bigger installed base lets you command), and finally add new revenue streams by making anyone who wants to play HALO online pony up a $10 per month access fee for the only network that the unmodded XBox will connect to. (Damn, that was a long sentence.)
So in the end, Dave's right - it comes down to either breaking the model early with mods that don't pay Redmond or waiting 5 years until MS controls the console gaming universe and we gotta cough up monthly fees or go outside and get a life. Assuming, of course, that Nintendo/PS/whatever doesn't interfere too much wiht the 'gain more market share' parts. Should be an intersting thing to watch...
Now think of what happens if someone MAMEs the XBox, mods it to be a cheap PC, or otherwise does something that causes the user to treat it as something other than a dedicated system for 'legal' gaming. In this case MS is just paying part of your equipment costs and not getting the return they expected. Modding the XBox to be a Linux machine just adds insult to injury in their eyes.
I think this answers some of the questions brought up in posts where people wonder why MS is fighting this kind of use. I'd expect MS to continue to fight this one tooth and nail, and with their history you know they will.
P.S. I did a (very cursory) google search to try to find the article outlining how the XBox business model works - if anyone knows where to find it and could post it in a reply it'd be cool.
With Microsoft involved we will still get the Blue Screen of Death, only now it'll be anti-aliased, vertex shaded, and happen at 400+ fps.