Aother article on the same story: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23978 If the story itself weren't bad enough, this article goes over the top. By calling it "drug dealing" instead of drug dispensing, the headline make it seem like the robot is out on street corners selling illegal narcotics.
It's hard to know what really happened, as both of these stories treat the event so lightly. It appears the reporters and editors see news as providing entertainment instead of providing information.
I am sick of the cookies that serve NO PURPOSE other than tracking users on the Internet
Exactly what the story is about, exactly why they want cookies. Doubleclick has been the most infamous entity doing this, ISTR there was a lawsuit against them circa 1998-1999.
. . . ya know...the ones that are really getting set by the one pixel JPGs in your e-mails . .
Technically those are called webbugs, but yes, they're similar enough, among other things they allow spammers to see when a particular person has opened an email, thus verifying the address. I NEVER have image or other file loading from HTML on email, and I would only render the text in email HTML to read email from clueless aquaintances.
According to Einstein, space-time can curve back on itself, theoretically allowing travellers to double back and meet younger versions of themselves.
And now a team of physicists from the US and Austria says this situation can only be the case if there are physical constraints acting to protect the present from changes in the past.
No wonder they're having so much trouble filming the movie version of "A Sound of Thunder." I was so looking forward to see it.
The last time a man (or human of any gender) walked on the Moon was what, 1972 or 1973? I was a teen at the time. It would be nice to see this again before I reach retirement age!
So instead of taking 3 billion years for all the known supercomputers to factor my 2048-bit RSA key, it will only take 2.5 billion years.
That is of course using a current computer, which will never go any faster (and presuming it actually has 100 percent uptime for 2.5 billion years - must be running Linux).
At the current rate of computing power, and presuming for a moment that the "computer" this thing runs on increases in speed exponentially to match the rate of growth of computing speed, how long will it take?
25,000 years?
250 years?
25+ years (we hit The Singularity in 25 years, IT does it in 25 milliseconds) ?
The NSA is the single biggest employer of mathematicians in the world, and it's probably safe to say that they are at least a couple of years ahead of the rest of the world as far as cryptography and cryptanalysis is concerned.... but you can't buy advances in mathematics with money.
Then what do they use to pay their mathematicians? Coffee?
let's say you have an item and need the owner's manual for it - just scan and go right to the page that has a link to it.
Each Cue Cat has a built-in unique serial number that gets sent to the company along with what you scanned, so it was basically spyware.
granted, tech has changed a bit since they first came out, and a bar code reader (or RFID reader) integrated into a cell phone or PDA might make more sense, but they weren't quite so ubiquitous when cue cat came out.
I suspect attitudes toward spyware have changed (or perhaps there are just tens of millions of people on the Net now who don't know or care what spyware is), so ironically it might have been ahead of its time.
(or so, depending on my ability to count)out of 27 paragraphs. P. 22 starts with "The new cold fusion experiment went something like this:" so you have to skip through 3/4'th of the article to get to the meat of the story. It's mostly a subatomics physics tutorial rather than a news story. As others said, CSM is a respectable enough news source, but I get weary of science reporting like this where so much 'stuff' is explained before getting to the actual description of what the scientists did.
One of the guys involved in this experiment has done work with somnoluminescense
That's sonoluminescence - I searched for 'sono' through the posts to look for this, and found it in the wiki link in another response to your post.
which for those of you that don't know is when you see tiny flashes of light coming from collapsing bubbles in high-pressure underwater situations.
This was in "The Amateur Scientist" column in February 1995 Scientific American, "Producing Light from a Bubble of Air." (someone sells a CD of ALL the Amateur Scientist columns, it's highly recommended).
They thought for a while that this might be a feasible way of producing fusion, but the last I heard they decided that the flashes of light were actually reflections off the bubbles from the camera equipment used to record the phenomenon and not, as they hoped, tiny fusion reactions caused by the pressure of the bubble collapsing.
I've seen reports in recent months saying it IS fusion, but it's definitely not 'reflections' of outside light from camera equipment, as all reports say this is visible with the unaided eye, presumably without 'camera equipment' being in the room. And as the other poster said, one wouild only need to turn out the room lights to make it go away.
Is that Bill Gates will have "seen the light" and releases all the windows source to the public domain.
That would punish both programmers ("What rotten code, yet another security bug") and end users (cracker/programmers will say "Hot damn, yet another security bug!").
Didn't they say that was what the internet was supposed to do?
I forget where I first heard something like that and what it was referring to, "this technology will bring the world together, there will be no more war, bla bla bla..." was it the communications satellite (invented by Arthur C. Clark so many decades ago) offering instant (minus speed-of-light delays) communications around the world, or was it Television itself?
It was likely said even earlier about radio, the telephone, and the telegraph.
Why should the fact that the person believes what they're doing is illegal make an otherwise legal action illegal? That makes no sense.
I don't see that it's "otherwise legal." Quoting the last sentence of the "Implied Licensing" section of the website you reference: "Whether any particular material might be covered by an implied licence is something you will have to judge from the website you found it on, but you cannot argue that you have an implied licence where the material was on the Internet illegally in the first place of course."
Back to quoting parent: AFAIK, you do not need written permission from the copyright holder to have a valid license.
I concede that point, but as the quote above makes clear, that doesn't give a valid license for something where the download is illegal to begin with.
Quote: [...] you have an implied licence where all the circumstances suggest that the copyright owner expected you to use his or her copyright material in the way you are going to use it, even though this was never discussed and has not been written down anywhere (source) Interesting that you should quote that. The copyright owner clearly did not allow and would not have allowed it to be freely downloaded, but the way it's worded, and in this day and age, the copyright owner probably does and certainly should EXPECT the material to be "shared" on P2P/bittorrents, thus by that wording it's not a violation of copyright.
If that wording acurately represents the actual law, then copyright law no longer means much.
I don't think this would work. If the copyright holder initiates the download, this distribution is done with the consent of the copyright holder, and is thus probably not illegal.
I don't see that. The person hosting the file has no way of knowing the person DL'ing it is the copyright holder unless the holder identifies himself as such (who obviously would not for the purpose of this DL).
An even stronger argument, for the DL to be legal, regardless of who DL's it, the host needs WRITTEN permission from the copyright holder, who obviously did not give it.
Copyright holders have to prove that someone actually downloaded the file from you before you can be found liable for distributing.
I'm not down with this P2P stuff, why can't they just get the file and find the IP address, thus demonstrating the file wasn't just "available", but was actually distributed?
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.snopes.com/business/genius/spacepen.asp
An Anonymous Coward wrote:
Just because theories, such as Einstein's, are accepted today does not mean they will never be challenged and/or disproved.
And the person who gets the Nobel Physics prize for doing so is going to say "I was an Anonymous Coward on Slashdot!"
Aother article on the same story:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=23978
If the story itself weren't bad enough, this article goes over the top. By calling it "drug dealing" instead of drug dispensing, the headline make it seem like the robot is out on street corners selling illegal narcotics.
It's hard to know what really happened, as both of these stories treat the event so lightly. It appears the reporters and editors see news as providing entertainment instead of providing information.
As part of a continuous effort of karma prostitution, I offer this related story:
i cleID=160400749
"Company Bypasses Cookie-Deleting Consumers"
http://www.internetweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?art
Pertinent Sentence:
"United Virtualities's PIE helps combat this consumer behavior by leveraging a feature in Flash MX called local shared objects."
It's what the title might as well be...
I am sick of the cookies that serve NO PURPOSE other than tracking users on the Internet
Exactly what the story is about, exactly why they want cookies. Doubleclick has been the most infamous entity doing this, ISTR there was a lawsuit against them circa 1998-1999.
. . . ya know...the ones that are really getting set by the one pixel JPGs in your e-mails . .
Technically those are called webbugs, but yes, they're similar enough, among other things they allow spammers to see when a particular person has opened an email, thus verifying the address. I NEVER have image or other file loading from HTML on email, and I would only render the text in email HTML to read email from clueless aquaintances.
Malicious use of anothers' computer without authorisation. Basically, "hackers" in the let's stop these criminals sense.
That would be "hackers" in the crackers sense. Though I recall the Byte editorial on "those darn golfers" and I knew it was too late even then.
Quoting TFA:
According to Einstein, space-time can curve back on itself, theoretically allowing travellers to double back and meet younger versions of themselves.
And now a team of physicists from the US and Austria says this situation can only be the case if there are physical constraints acting to protect the present from changes in the past.
No wonder they're having so much trouble filming the movie version of "A Sound of Thunder." I was so looking forward to see it.
*I* want to be able to go to the moon and that is not going to happen, *ever*, through NASA.
. . . act like a robot.
Why isn't ...
And especially don't read the "Questions from other members"
No, not that bizzare '60's TV show...
The last time a man (or human of any gender) walked on the Moon was what, 1972 or 1973? I was a teen at the time. It would be nice to see this again before I reach retirement age!
So instead of taking 3 billion years for all the known supercomputers to factor my 2048-bit RSA key, it will only take 2.5 billion years.
That is of course using a current computer, which will never go any faster (and presuming it actually has 100 percent uptime for 2.5 billion years - must be running Linux).
At the current rate of computing power, and presuming for a moment that the "computer" this thing runs on increases in speed exponentially to match the rate of growth of computing speed, how long will it take?
25,000 years?
250 years?
25+ years (we hit The Singularity in 25 years, IT does it in 25 milliseconds) ?
The NSA is the single biggest employer of mathematicians in the world, and it's probably safe to say that they are at least a couple of years ahead of the rest of the world as far as cryptography and cryptanalysis is concerned. ... but you can't buy advances in mathematics with money.
Then what do they use to pay their mathematicians? Coffee?
but of course that'll never happen.
let's say you have an item and need the owner's manual for it - just scan and go right to the page that has a link to it.
Each Cue Cat has a built-in unique serial number that gets sent to the company along with what you scanned, so it was basically spyware.
granted, tech has changed a bit since they first came out, and a bar code reader (or RFID reader) integrated into a cell phone or PDA might make more sense, but they weren't quite so ubiquitous when cue cat came out.
I suspect attitudes toward spyware have changed (or perhaps there are just tens of millions of people on the Net now who don't know or care what spyware is), so ironically it might have been ahead of its time.
(or so, depending on my ability to count)out of 27 paragraphs. P. 22 starts with "The new cold fusion experiment went something like this:" so you have to skip through 3/4'th of the article to get to the meat of the story. It's mostly a subatomics physics tutorial rather than a news story.
As others said, CSM is a respectable enough news source, but I get weary of science reporting like this where so much 'stuff' is explained before getting to the actual description of what the scientists did.
One of the guys involved in this experiment has done work with somnoluminescense
That's sonoluminescence - I searched for 'sono' through the posts to look for this, and found it in the wiki link in another response to your post.
which for those of you that don't know is when you see tiny flashes of light coming from collapsing bubbles in high-pressure underwater situations.
This was in "The Amateur Scientist" column in February 1995 Scientific American, "Producing Light from a Bubble of Air." (someone sells a CD of ALL the Amateur Scientist columns, it's highly recommended).
They thought for a while that this might be a feasible way of producing fusion, but the last I heard they decided that the flashes of light were actually reflections off the bubbles from the camera equipment used to record the phenomenon and not, as they hoped, tiny fusion reactions caused by the pressure of the bubble collapsing.
I've seen reports in recent months saying it IS fusion, but it's definitely not 'reflections' of outside light from camera equipment, as all reports say this is visible with the unaided eye, presumably without 'camera equipment' being in the room. And as the other poster said, one wouild only need to turn out the room lights to make it go away.
Is that Bill Gates will have "seen the light" and releases all the windows source to the public domain.
That would punish both programmers ("What rotten code, yet another security bug") and end users (cracker/programmers will say "Hot damn, yet another security bug!").
Once you get 10000 scientists experimenting with fusion on a daily basis, other interesting stuff will happen soon.
If it's real, you'll soon have 9999 scientists trying to reproduce, SAFELY, whatever it was the 10,000th scientist did...
Perhaps all these scientists should have live webcams on them with remote data saving.
Didn't they say that was what the internet was supposed to do?
I forget where I first heard something like that and what it was referring to, "this technology will bring the world together, there will be no more war, bla bla bla..." was it the communications satellite (invented by Arthur C. Clark so many decades ago) offering instant (minus speed-of-light delays) communications around the world, or was it Television itself?
It was likely said even earlier about radio, the telephone, and the telegraph.
It's just like the clock radio in your bedroom, except the up and down arrow buttons only nudge the time by 1 femtosecond per click.
So what if the clock is 780,000,000 femtoseconds off? How many operations are those little buttons good for?
After 50 years the first atomic clock will have lost, what, a few thousands of a second?
it could just as easily have gained a few thousanths of a second. It was only the first one, so it could have been pretty inaccurate.
Why should the fact that the person believes what they're doing is illegal make an otherwise legal action illegal? That makes no sense.
I don't see that it's "otherwise legal." Quoting the last sentence of the "Implied Licensing" section of the website you reference:
"Whether any particular material might be covered by an implied licence is something you will have to judge from the website you found it on, but you cannot argue that you have an implied licence where the material was on the Internet illegally in the first place of course."
Back to quoting parent:
AFAIK, you do not need written permission from the copyright holder to have a valid license.
I concede that point, but as the quote above makes clear, that doesn't give a valid license for something where the download is illegal to begin with.
Quote: [...] you have an implied licence where all the circumstances suggest that the copyright owner expected you to use his or her copyright material in the way you are going to use it, even though this was never discussed and has not been written down anywhere (source)
Interesting that you should quote that. The copyright owner clearly did not allow and would not have allowed it to be freely downloaded, but the way it's worded, and in this day and age, the copyright owner probably does and certainly should EXPECT the material to be "shared" on P2P/bittorrents, thus by that wording it's not a violation of copyright.
If that wording acurately represents the actual law, then copyright law no longer means much.
From TFA:
scientists have extracted and decoded the DNA of a cave bear that died 40,000 years ago.
or does Crichton have to write the book first?
I don't think this would work. If the copyright holder initiates the download, this distribution is done with the consent of the copyright holder, and is thus probably not illegal.
I don't see that. The person hosting the file has no way of knowing the person DL'ing it is the copyright holder unless the holder identifies himself as such (who obviously would not for the purpose of this DL).
An even stronger argument, for the DL to be legal, regardless of who DL's it, the host needs WRITTEN permission from the copyright holder, who obviously did not give it.
Copyright holders have to prove that someone actually downloaded the file from you before you can be found liable for distributing.
I'm not down with this P2P stuff, why can't they just get the file and find the IP address, thus demonstrating the file wasn't just "available", but was actually distributed?