Not to mention 6) Stalker's dream come true. Watch from the comfort of your own home when your victim leaves the house, her habits and when she's most vulnerable.
You do know this isn't actually made from sewage, yes? They grow algae on the sewage, then harvest the algae and make biodiesel out of the algae. The slashdot headline is incorrect exageration, as per usual.
The thing about this is that it doesn't take up any extra land. We already have sewage outfalls and treatment plants, so stick this algae on top and farm them off. As long as you generate more fuel than you use in the farvesting process, that's free fuel with no lose of acres.
His print shop is publically-traded? I work with a graphic designer specializing in print work, so I have contact with quite a few print shops. Some are sole traders (non-corporations) and some are incorporated, but none that I know of (apart from the large chains like Kiwk Kopy) are publically traded.
It's about cranking out good little drones who will do their factory jobs and not revolt against the government for breaking its covenant with the citizenry.
I think that's a bit tinfoil-hattish. People are lazy enough without needing to manufacture a conspiracy to explain it. Here in Australia at least, I think education is primarily about baby-sitting more than education. People want to have both partners working and have kids and they bitch when the government doesn't pick up their slack.
Actually this has little use period. This isn't some cool e-ink for printing on fabric. This is a PDA with it's screen superglued to a transparent window in a backpack. Not flexible, cannot maintain state without power, bloody expensive and impractical for large uses. It'd be no more useful for adaptive camoflage than walking around with a plasma TV haning from your neck would be.
Wrong. I am exactly the market for a device like this. I've been looking for a small tablet device to take notes with at school
And these people specifically designed it for uses that don't involve a lot of typing. This is not the device you're looking for. When I was commuting, I would have loved a device like this, except for two things. Price. $800 is way, way too expensive for a portable media player. And no DVD drive. I have no idea what the hell they're thinking not including a DVD drive on a media device.
I'm not saying this device is awesome and needs no changes, I'm saying the changes you outline aren't improving this device in the fields it's aiming at. Your changes might make it better, but it would turn it into a miniature computer rather than a media station. Now, a miniature computer might be a better product, but it's not what this product is trying to be.
I'm not sure this is so much an actual test as it is a public demonstration. What with inviting people to view it and all, it seems more PR than science. Not that that's a bad thing - I assume there's been plenty of scientific testing leading up to this point.
First of all, it runs Linux (no flames please; everyone should be able to admit that most people don't use Linux).
Nobody gives a stuff what OS it runs. As long as you can double-click the movie/audio icons to play them, most consumers won't notice that it's different to windows under the hood. They'd expect a device like this to have differences to a fully-fledged computer.
Second, it's got a strange keyboard that you probably can't touch-type on.
And yet, people are destroying their thumbs on mobile phone keypads daily. This is a step up from that, at the very least, and is not designed to be used to enter a lot of information. The article specifically says it's designed for media consumption - playing audio, video and surfing the web. If you think you're going to be using this thing to write reports, buy a laptop.
And finally, it's slow. I don't care what kind of IPC it has; 624 MHz just isn't fast enough for something big enough to be a real computer.
It's not trying to be a real computer. It's trying to be a media station. Nobody who uses it will care how fast it's clock-cycles are as long it doesn't skip during DVD playback.
Now, you wanna know how to fix it? Turn it into a convertible tablet with a real keyboard, put in a bigger (10.4") screen, give it a decent CPU (e.g. 1+ GHz) and more RAM, and (as much as it pains me to say it) put Windows Tablet Edition (or better yet, Mac OS, but that's just a fantasy) on it.
So, turn it into a laptop? I think all you've done is prove that you're not the target market for this device.
That's not the market they're aiming for. From the article, the Pepper Pad "is going to be optimized more for data consumption than data creation". These things are designed primarily for audio/video playback and web-browsing. Of the three, only web-browsing requires a keyboard interface, and that only for entering username/passwords (although this could be cached in the browser) or for typing in URLs. People may use it for posting to blogs (or slashdot), but that's getting back to production rather than consumption.
The main problem I see with this product? No DVD drive. What's that all about? For a product that's aiming for the mobile video market, how can you ignore DVD support?
How is what you complain of any worse than what we already have?
Currently I carry around a Medicare card and a drivers license. When I was unemployed, I carried a card that gave me access to cheaper public transport and medical services. When I was a student, I carried around a student card. Instead of carrying around 50 different cards, I'd much rather just carry around the single card.
Smart cards can be copied, yes. But so can our current medicare cards, drivers licenses, etc. At least smart cards a bit harder.
When I opened my first bank account, I had to provide a whole stack of different documents to prove my identity. It would be much more convenient to be able to do that with a single card. Of course, for the card to be of any use at all, it has to be reasonably secure and safe from forgery, identity theft and so on. But they are all weaknesses in the current system.
In short, I can't see how a national ID card can do any worse that what we have now, and there's a chance it could be better.
Patents are supposed to be used by the people who invent things to get money from the people who use those inventions to make products.
This company neither invents things, nor makes products based on the inventions of others. That's necessary when your company is a patent troll. You cannot have any actual productive work being done whatsoever, or you are made vulnerable to other people's patents. The problem with patent trolls isn't that they are using patents to make money - it's that they're using patents to make money while contributing nothing in the process.
Patents are a trade off between the public and an inventor. The trade is "you give us a new invention and we give you exclusivity". The problem with it these days is the people who are making these trades on behalf of the public (USPTO) are making bloody bad deals. They're giving out patents for processes about which the public already knows, or doesn't care.
A patent is not (or at least, should not be) given for a new idea, it's given for a new process. If the public already knows how to implement a one-click purchase system, then there should be no patent given out, regardless of whether or not anyone's thought of that idea, because the public isn't getting anything out of it. They already know how to do it. Why do they need the patent applicant to tell them how to do it? That's the problem. Patents which are a trade of "something for something" are good. But in far too many cases these days, patents are trades of "something for nothing" because the public already has what the patent applicant is offering to sell them.
No, it hasn't. Fan service is just something that was put in to cater to the fans. This could nudity, or panty-flashes, but it could also be (and often is) flashy mecha scenes, hints of romance between two characters, excessive violence, etc.
A bit dated to call everything you don't understand supernatural
Maybe, but people still do. The original poster said that science should investigate anything except the supernatural. My problem with that is that the supernatural is often defined as something that is not explained, rather than something that can not be explained.
For instance, anciently people believed that lightning was a supernatural effect. They were wrong, but if they had worked off of the original poster's argument, they would never have discovered it to be a natural effect. What I'm saying is the only way to determine whether something is "natural" or not is to try and investigate it. You can't just say "that appears to be supernatural so let's ignore it".
And there's no way to stop users giving out their passwords. There's just no way. Unless you couple the password with something like biometrics, which is signicantly harder, not to mention more painful, to give away.
Quantum mechanics was considered to be supernatural - or rather, no other explanation for quantum mechanical effects could be given other than the supernatural. If we had excluded from science any investigation of what was considered supernatural, quantum mechanics would not have been discovered. Nothing should be excluded from scientific examination, if science can find a means by which to examine it.
In this case the first security breach (compromise of the password) is not necessarily time-connected to the second one (unauthorized access to the password protected entity), and such the detection of both is more complicated.
And yet, the same could be said for the installation of a USB keylogger if given physical access to the machine. The greater danger with writing the password down, I find, isn't so much unauthorized access as improperly authenticated access. You're not in danger of industrial espionage so much as someone logging in using a coworkers account to do something illegal/immoral. And if that's the case, well, it's the problem of the user who wrote down the password, not the sysadmin.
If a lot of predictions come true, and the theory stands up for a long time, we tend to call it a law, such as the law of gravity. Evolution should rightly be called a law by now, the weight of evidence is overwhelming
That is the hookiest definition of a scientific law I've ever seen. Scientific laws are not defined by a preponderance of evidence. That's civil suits. Scientific theories are laws if and only if they can be reduced to a simple statement and that statement proven. From wikipedia: "a physical law is a summary observation of strictly empirical matters, whereas a theory is a model that accounts for the observation."
Evolution is a theory (note, this is a categorization, not a statement on the validity of evolution) because it offers a model whereby organisms can adapat and change over time. Even among people who agree on the validity of evolution have differing opinions on the precise mechanisms - punctuated equilibrium or smooth progression? An example of a law would be: There is no process that, operating in cycle, produces no other effect than the subtraction of a positive amount of heat from a reservoir and the production of an equal amount of work
It makes a simple claim that can be (logically speaking) disproven. If you manage to create a process that produces more energy than it uses, you will have disproven the second law of thermodynamics. What is the proposed law of evolution, and how could it logically be disproven?
The existance of god and the supernatural is not falsifiable, and therefore must be discounted as possibilities when conducting rigorous science.
The existance of god is not falsifiable, but it may be provable. If, for example, the Second Coming ends up happening, then there's going to be some pretty chunky scientific evidence for the existance of god. Likewise, assuming Jesus existed and did what the Bible said, there would be some pretty good scientific evidence for assuming he had unexplained powers. Of course, when it comes, not to proving God's existance, but explaining a process in the natural world, "God did it" is not a satisfactory explanation until you prove the existance of god.
BTW, about the "supernatural" thing, I find it a bit disingenious to talk about that in scientific terms. Science's stock in trade is turning the supernatural into the natural. Flight, communication at the speed of light, electronics, all these things would have been considered supernatural at some point. Supernatural really just means "things with no explanation". Once science has found an explanation, they are recategorized as "natural". "Supernatural" is just the set of phenomena for which science has not yet come up with an explanation.
Things like flight, electric light, and space travel, while perhaps at one time seeming impossible, are not nor have ever been supernatural!
But they would have seemed so at the time. Cutting it to the core, what the grandparent was saying is that you should discount nothing that has not been scientifically disproved. People have said heavier-than-air flight was impossible, space travel was impossible, hell, there were probably people saying (or grunting) that controllable fire was impossible. The point is, you should not deny something's existance until it has been scientifically disproven. And yes, that does include God, pixies, and whatever else. It doesn't mean you have to believe; it means you shouldn't deny their existence without evidence.
I think the GPs point was that physical access to a machine compromises security by definition. If you have physical access to a mchine, you can install a keylogger to find the password (as simple as an inline USB dongle on the keyboard), remove the harddrive and crack at your leisure (a bit more noticable) or anything in between. Hell, you could just cart off the machine.
If you're in a place where security is sufficiently tight to have mechanisms to prevent this (ie: Security Guards) then they're likely to be sufficient to cover the little password notes in the top drawer as well as the machine itself.
Slashdot Mirror
profit with no product nor service nor any other material trapping.
It's called Communism; the system where the biggest bludger wins.
Not to mention 6) Stalker's dream come true. Watch from the comfort of your own home when your victim leaves the house, her habits and when she's most vulnerable.
You do know this isn't actually made from sewage, yes? They grow algae on the sewage, then harvest the algae and make biodiesel out of the algae. The slashdot headline is incorrect exageration, as per usual.
The thing about this is that it doesn't take up any extra land. We already have sewage outfalls and treatment plants, so stick this algae on top and farm them off. As long as you generate more fuel than you use in the farvesting process, that's free fuel with no lose of acres.
His print shop is publically-traded? I work with a graphic designer specializing in print work, so I have contact with quite a few print shops. Some are sole traders (non-corporations) and some are incorporated, but none that I know of (apart from the large chains like Kiwk Kopy) are publically traded.
It's about cranking out good little drones who will do their factory jobs and not revolt against the government for breaking its covenant with the citizenry.
I think that's a bit tinfoil-hattish. People are lazy enough without needing to manufacture a conspiracy to explain it. Here in Australia at least, I think education is primarily about baby-sitting more than education. People want to have both partners working and have kids and they bitch when the government doesn't pick up their slack.
Actually this has little use period. This isn't some cool e-ink for printing on fabric. This is a PDA with it's screen superglued to a transparent window in a backpack. Not flexible, cannot maintain state without power, bloody expensive and impractical for large uses. It'd be no more useful for adaptive camoflage than walking around with a plasma TV haning from your neck would be.
Wrong. I am exactly the market for a device like this. I've been looking for a small tablet device to take notes with at school
And these people specifically designed it for uses that don't involve a lot of typing. This is not the device you're looking for. When I was commuting, I would have loved a device like this, except for two things. Price. $800 is way, way too expensive for a portable media player. And no DVD drive. I have no idea what the hell they're thinking not including a DVD drive on a media device.
I'm not saying this device is awesome and needs no changes, I'm saying the changes you outline aren't improving this device in the fields it's aiming at. Your changes might make it better, but it would turn it into a miniature computer rather than a media station. Now, a miniature computer might be a better product, but it's not what this product is trying to be.
I'm not sure this is so much an actual test as it is a public demonstration. What with inviting people to view it and all, it seems more PR than science. Not that that's a bad thing - I assume there's been plenty of scientific testing leading up to this point.
First of all, it runs Linux (no flames please; everyone should be able to admit that most people don't use Linux).
Nobody gives a stuff what OS it runs. As long as you can double-click the movie/audio icons to play them, most consumers won't notice that it's different to windows under the hood. They'd expect a device like this to have differences to a fully-fledged computer.
Second, it's got a strange keyboard that you probably can't touch-type on.
And yet, people are destroying their thumbs on mobile phone keypads daily. This is a step up from that, at the very least, and is not designed to be used to enter a lot of information. The article specifically says it's designed for media consumption - playing audio, video and surfing the web. If you think you're going to be using this thing to write reports, buy a laptop.
And finally, it's slow. I don't care what kind of IPC it has; 624 MHz just isn't fast enough for something big enough to be a real computer.
It's not trying to be a real computer. It's trying to be a media station. Nobody who uses it will care how fast it's clock-cycles are as long it doesn't skip during DVD playback.
Now, you wanna know how to fix it? Turn it into a convertible tablet with a real keyboard, put in a bigger (10.4") screen, give it a decent CPU (e.g. 1+ GHz) and more RAM, and (as much as it pains me to say it) put Windows Tablet Edition (or better yet, Mac OS, but that's just a fantasy) on it.
So, turn it into a laptop? I think all you've done is prove that you're not the target market for this device.
That's not the market they're aiming for. From the article, the Pepper Pad "is going to be optimized more for data consumption than data creation". These things are designed primarily for audio/video playback and web-browsing. Of the three, only web-browsing requires a keyboard interface, and that only for entering username/passwords (although this could be cached in the browser) or for typing in URLs. People may use it for posting to blogs (or slashdot), but that's getting back to production rather than consumption.
The main problem I see with this product? No DVD drive. What's that all about? For a product that's aiming for the mobile video market, how can you ignore DVD support?
Only on slashdot would you hear coffee being describer as "an excellent platform for customization".
Yeah, but it'd suck if the judge had to bump your sentance to 57 years just to get his code to work out right.
How is what you complain of any worse than what we already have?
Currently I carry around a Medicare card and a drivers license. When I was unemployed, I carried a card that gave me access to cheaper public transport and medical services. When I was a student, I carried around a student card. Instead of carrying around 50 different cards, I'd much rather just carry around the single card.
Smart cards can be copied, yes. But so can our current medicare cards, drivers licenses, etc. At least smart cards a bit harder.
When I opened my first bank account, I had to provide a whole stack of different documents to prove my identity. It would be much more convenient to be able to do that with a single card. Of course, for the card to be of any use at all, it has to be reasonably secure and safe from forgery, identity theft and so on. But they are all weaknesses in the current system.
In short, I can't see how a national ID card can do any worse that what we have now, and there's a chance it could be better.
Patents are supposed to be used by the people who invent things to get money from the people who use those inventions to make products.
This company neither invents things, nor makes products based on the inventions of others. That's necessary when your company is a patent troll. You cannot have any actual productive work being done whatsoever, or you are made vulnerable to other people's patents. The problem with patent trolls isn't that they are using patents to make money - it's that they're using patents to make money while contributing nothing in the process.
Patents are a trade off between the public and an inventor. The trade is "you give us a new invention and we give you exclusivity". The problem with it these days is the people who are making these trades on behalf of the public (USPTO) are making bloody bad deals. They're giving out patents for processes about which the public already knows, or doesn't care.
A patent is not (or at least, should not be) given for a new idea, it's given for a new process. If the public already knows how to implement a one-click purchase system, then there should be no patent given out, regardless of whether or not anyone's thought of that idea, because the public isn't getting anything out of it. They already know how to do it. Why do they need the patent applicant to tell them how to do it? That's the problem. Patents which are a trade of "something for something" are good. But in far too many cases these days, patents are trades of "something for nothing" because the public already has what the patent applicant is offering to sell them.
No, it hasn't. Fan service is just something that was put in to cater to the fans. This could nudity, or panty-flashes, but it could also be (and often is) flashy mecha scenes, hints of romance between two characters, excessive violence, etc.
A bit dated to call everything you don't understand supernatural
Maybe, but people still do. The original poster said that science should investigate anything except the supernatural. My problem with that is that the supernatural is often defined as something that is not explained, rather than something that can not be explained.
For instance, anciently people believed that lightning was a supernatural effect. They were wrong, but if they had worked off of the original poster's argument, they would never have discovered it to be a natural effect. What I'm saying is the only way to determine whether something is "natural" or not is to try and investigate it. You can't just say "that appears to be supernatural so let's ignore it".
And there's no way to stop users giving out their passwords. There's just no way. Unless you couple the password with something like biometrics, which is signicantly harder, not to mention more painful, to give away.
Quantum mechanics was considered to be supernatural - or rather, no other explanation for quantum mechanical effects could be given other than the supernatural. If we had excluded from science any investigation of what was considered supernatural, quantum mechanics would not have been discovered. Nothing should be excluded from scientific examination, if science can find a means by which to examine it.
In this case the first security breach (compromise of the password) is not necessarily time-connected to the second one (unauthorized access to the password protected entity), and such the detection of both is more complicated.
And yet, the same could be said for the installation of a USB keylogger if given physical access to the machine. The greater danger with writing the password down, I find, isn't so much unauthorized access as improperly authenticated access. You're not in danger of industrial espionage so much as someone logging in using a coworkers account to do something illegal/immoral. And if that's the case, well, it's the problem of the user who wrote down the password, not the sysadmin.
If a lot of predictions come true, and the theory stands up for a long time, we tend to call it a law, such as the law of gravity. Evolution should rightly be called a law by now, the weight of evidence is overwhelming
That is the hookiest definition of a scientific law I've ever seen. Scientific laws are not defined by a preponderance of evidence. That's civil suits. Scientific theories are laws if and only if they can be reduced to a simple statement and that statement proven. From wikipedia: "a physical law is a summary observation of strictly empirical matters, whereas a theory is a model that accounts for the observation."
Evolution is a theory (note, this is a categorization, not a statement on the validity of evolution) because it offers a model whereby organisms can adapat and change over time. Even among people who agree on the validity of evolution have differing opinions on the precise mechanisms - punctuated equilibrium or smooth progression? An example of a law would be:
There is no process that, operating in cycle, produces no other effect than the subtraction of a positive amount of heat from a reservoir and the production of an equal amount of work
It makes a simple claim that can be (logically speaking) disproven. If you manage to create a process that produces more energy than it uses, you will have disproven the second law of thermodynamics. What is the proposed law of evolution, and how could it logically be disproven?
The existance of god and the supernatural is not falsifiable, and therefore must be discounted as possibilities when conducting rigorous science.
The existance of god is not falsifiable, but it may be provable. If, for example, the Second Coming ends up happening, then there's going to be some pretty chunky scientific evidence for the existance of god. Likewise, assuming Jesus existed and did what the Bible said, there would be some pretty good scientific evidence for assuming he had unexplained powers. Of course, when it comes, not to proving God's existance, but explaining a process in the natural world, "God did it" is not a satisfactory explanation until you prove the existance of god.
BTW, about the "supernatural" thing, I find it a bit disingenious to talk about that in scientific terms. Science's stock in trade is turning the supernatural into the natural. Flight, communication at the speed of light, electronics, all these things would have been considered supernatural at some point. Supernatural really just means "things with no explanation". Once science has found an explanation, they are recategorized as "natural". "Supernatural" is just the set of phenomena for which science has not yet come up with an explanation.
Things like flight, electric light, and space travel, while perhaps at one time seeming impossible, are not nor have ever been supernatural!
But they would have seemed so at the time. Cutting it to the core, what the grandparent was saying is that you should discount nothing that has not been scientifically disproved. People have said heavier-than-air flight was impossible, space travel was impossible, hell, there were probably people saying (or grunting) that controllable fire was impossible. The point is, you should not deny something's existance until it has been scientifically disproven. And yes, that does include God, pixies, and whatever else. It doesn't mean you have to believe; it means you shouldn't deny their existence without evidence.
I think the GPs point was that physical access to a machine compromises security by definition. If you have physical access to a mchine, you can install a keylogger to find the password (as simple as an inline USB dongle on the keyboard), remove the harddrive and crack at your leisure (a bit more noticable) or anything in between. Hell, you could just cart off the machine.
If you're in a place where security is sufficiently tight to have mechanisms to prevent this (ie: Security Guards) then they're likely to be sufficient to cover the little password notes in the top drawer as well as the machine itself.
I don't believe number 2 is applicable any more.