So for a thief to scan your home for equipment, they must.
A) Get a suitable detector
B) Configure it to read each and every of the potential wavelengths for all RFID tags,
C) Configure it to understand the protocol(s) and protocol variations for all RFID tags in the area
D) Then, without being able to actually see limits of the area being scanned, one must scan the entire area.
E) Profit.
The cost of the RFID equipment probably gets back to the thief after the first house robbed. The potential victim has to spend the money just not to get robbed. Pretty unfair, in my view.
So a good player is automatically a cheater? Doesn't sound fair too me.
Mixing "fair" and "business" is so 19-th century... Casino is a factory producing money by extracting it from rich morons. In terms of technology you can think of this system as a filter that ensures good input material quality (filter out smartasses, leave morons).
Fear not. Many if not most interesting mathematical problems are of the form "Is there an x in an (infinite) set S having a property P?".
Of course if such an x doesn't exist, you cannot solve this by applying brute force directly. You have to put some minimum of creative thinking into transforming such a problem into a finite case (as it was done in case of the 4-coloring problem).
Well, honestly, there's a long list of nature-things that one should include if you're talking about the beauty of the night sky. How about deer, jumping bunnies, wildflowers, the natural beauty of a corn field?
Giving property rights to people/corporations/whatever is granting monopoly. So what's the difference? What's the difference between my corporation (let's pretend I have one:) ) buying a road and park area vs Microsoft getting patent rights?
The difference is that roads and parks are finite resources, so we must have a way to deal with their scarcity. Perhaps the current mix of private and public land ownership isn't the best way, but we haven't come up with anything better.
On the other hand patents in their current form grant ownership of an idea. Ideas aren't scarce. Many people can come up with the same idea (even with such an innovative concept as placing an order via Internet) and even more people can implement it without getting in each other's way. So land ownership deals with natural scarcity, whereas patents create artificial scarcity.
Indeed, even finding what code gets actually executed is by no way a simple task. Easy to follow from the main entry point of the executable? Not always. Some compilers/interpreters create tables of entry points for some functions then call the functions via entries in the table. Moreover, the table doesn't have to be present in the executable, but created at runtime instead (calculated from offsets or something). That's only one of many problems with static analysis of machine code. I don't think their program does much more than scanning for a set of known patterns produced by a set of known compilers.
I'm really starting to think that the whole static type checking as a requirement for large systems thing is just dogma.
In fact, Java is a proof of that. Static type checking with most collections being Object holders? If you want typechecking, use a language with some decent type constructors (C++ templates will do, but ML-derivatives have much cleaner type systems). If you implement generics with Object, you defer typechecking till runtime, when your Objects get downcast to whatever you hope they really are.
But who will verify the validity of the scanner's data? Is the supposed offense based on real numbers, or is it ideology based junk science?
How will I know which lies to believe?
Hm... Sorry, you have to use your brain, there really is no other way. Gather data from many sources - Internet, TV, Radio, friends, newspapers, organizations that you find trustworthy (at least up to a point). Don't believe any single source, even if it's a burning bush or a talking horse. If you asked the above questions, you're on the right track, just don't overdo with suspiciousness - reality really exists, it's not fed into your senses by a computer controlled by evil corporations.
Then, of course, you have to worry about the privacy implications. If the store is providing the wi-fi access, can/should they monitor what people are scanning? At the very least, this is an interesting project that raises interesting questions.
Indeed - imagine entering a store with the scanner... Minutes later a couple of men wearing black glasses appear all around you... Busy consumers don't hear your screams... Another terrorist (you) bites the dust...
The issue is that micropayments have overhead that vastly outweigh the actual payment. This overhead is in accounting, and it's not going to magically go away.
As far as I know most of the transaction in todays world are processed by machines (called computers). Some computer zealots claim that the machines are more effective than human accountants - they don't get tired and thus don't care if they process one 1000$ transaction or 100000 0.01$ transactions.
Sorry if this tips your sacred cow, reader, but in a world where something like Freenet would be necessary users would be shot in the head no matter how cleverly the data stores themselves resist tampering.
The point about Freenet is that you cannot divide countries into democracies, where Freenet is unnecessary and dictatorships, where Freenet is impossible. There is a continuum of possible options in between. I think of Freenet as a probe that tells you where on this continuum your country really is and perhaps does something to prevent sliding it down the scale.
Well, I wasn't really advocating writing your own XML parser, although if enough parameters are fixed (encoding, namespaces and such) and the DTD is simple, that might be an option. I was just trying to say that the parser does not have to be slow. Just try to find a SAX-style parser, one that lets you define events associated with tags (parsing on-the-fly) instead of one that slurps an XML file and produces a DOM-tree out of it. While the tree might prove more convenient (you can traverse it in all directions), its construction and destruction might be expensive.
It's hard to parse. That takes cycles. You can probably tweak the parsing to make it faster, but that might not get you from 20 concurrent to 2000 concurrent.
In my experience XML isn't hard to parse at all. Basically, you just have to recognize tags (basic regexp) and match opening ones and closing ones (use a stack, Luke).
The problem with perceived XML inefficiency is that many implementations build a whole parse tree in memory - that's slow mostly because of node allocations/deallocations. Removing the intermediary parse tree decreased CPU time per request by the factor of 15 in my application.
I've double checked, but the article isn't a cleverly disguised link to The Onion. Quote:
USA TODAY obtained government and corporate documents that provide a rare insider's look at Microsoft's efforts to keep from losing a key customer. Among other things, it:
* Agreed to let Munich go as long as six years, instead of the more normal three or four, without another expensive upgrade, a concession that runs against its bread-and-butter software upgrade strategy.
* Offered to let the city buy only Microsoft Word for some PCs and strip off other applications. Such unbundling cuts against Microsoft's practice of selling PCs loaded with software.
How about:
Letting the mayor not to lick Gates' boots?
Offering some Munich citizens the possibility not to send their first borns to Redmond?
"Much of what is funny about Dilbert cartoons is the disgust that technical workers have for managers who do not have intimate knowledge of the content of their work."
That doesn't match my experience. The best managers, those who can clear the way for/get out of the way of their technical staff, don't earn disgust, but respect, despite not having "intimate knowledge of the content" of the techies' work.
In my experience, those who move out of the way of their technical staff fall into two categories: those without technical knowledge and admitting it and those with much experience in the technical field who still remember how annoying it is to answer stupid phones while trying to get your conceptual work done. The most dangerous are those half baked types who happened to pick some technical knowledge God-knows-where and thought "Hey, that's easy! I can now help my tech workers!". This is what is funny about Dilbert.
Please don't expect Stunnix to give you any level of security. You should read the discussion on Perlmonks.
Yeah... perl obfuscator. What next? Fish bather? Doornail killer?
How ironic
on
Random Humor
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· Score: 5, Interesting
The anti-piracy clip that contains images from Tetris, whose inventor, Alexey Pajitnov never saw a penny from the Tetris sales. The software publishers took advantage of the fact that he, being a citizen of the Soviet Russia wasn't protected by the copyright law.
You set some basic ground rules and let natural human greed take care of the rest.
I am not kidding...
Unfortunately, it gets more complicated after a while.
Greed works, some people get rich, some get poor - they might even be richer than before, but they feel poor by comparison to the rich. Unfortunately, in case of the poor greed becomes jealousy.
They feel cheated, they want to kick the table and start a new deal (speaking in poker terms). Politicians appear who tell them they are right, and that they will change the situation. Well, if they get votes it gets funny, because there is no way to keep the promise - politicians can make the rich poor, but not the other way. Promises can be only kept by raising taxes and this of course only works for a limited amount of time.
It seems that Estonia somehow avoided this problem (they have linear tax!). I am curious why and whether they will have to deal with it in the future.
When it gets up to a certain speed, the wind resistance against your body will be greater than the friction of the belt against your feet, and you will cease to move forward...
Now this should look funny. But if you enclose the belt in a tube, with air moving with the speed of the belt (either artificially propelled or just "pulled" by the belt), the wind resistance becomes less of a problem.
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The cost of the RFID equipment probably gets back to the thief after the first house robbed. The potential victim has to spend the money just not to get robbed. Pretty unfair, in my view.
Soon we'll hear zillion infinities lines plus their dads being bigger than our dads.
Of course if such an x doesn't exist, you cannot solve this by applying brute force directly. You have to put some minimum of creative thinking into transforming such a problem into a finite case (as it was done in case of the 4-coloring problem).
"Aesthetically, there's not much to see with the SilentX; it looks like, well, a power supply."
On the other hand patents in their current form grant ownership of an idea. Ideas aren't scarce. Many people can come up with the same idea (even with such an innovative concept as placing an order via Internet) and even more people can implement it without getting in each other's way. So land ownership deals with natural scarcity, whereas patents create artificial scarcity.
Compressed executables, a la UPX.
Indeed, even finding what code gets actually executed is by no way a simple task. Easy to follow from the main entry point of the executable? Not always. Some compilers/interpreters create tables of entry points for some functions then call the functions via entries in the table. Moreover, the table doesn't have to be present in the executable, but created at runtime instead (calculated from offsets or something). That's only one of many problems with static analysis of machine code. I don't think their program does much more than scanning for a set of known patterns produced by a set of known compilers.
Well, I wasn't really advocating writing your own XML parser, although if enough parameters are fixed (encoding, namespaces and such) and the DTD is simple, that might be an option. I was just trying to say that the parser does not have to be slow. Just try to find a SAX-style parser, one that lets you define events associated with tags (parsing on-the-fly) instead of one that slurps an XML file and produces a DOM-tree out of it. While the tree might prove more convenient (you can traverse it in all directions), its construction and destruction might be expensive.
The problem with perceived XML inefficiency is that many implementations build a whole parse tree in memory - that's slow mostly because of node allocations/deallocations. Removing the intermediary parse tree decreased CPU time per request by the factor of 15 in my application.
Letting the mayor not to lick Gates' boots?
Offering some Munich citizens the possibility not to send their first borns to Redmond?
The anti-piracy clip that contains images from Tetris, whose inventor, Alexey Pajitnov never saw a penny from the Tetris sales. The software publishers took advantage of the fact that he, being a citizen of the Soviet Russia wasn't protected by the copyright law.
Greed works, some people get rich, some get poor - they might even be richer than before, but they feel poor by comparison to the rich. Unfortunately, in case of the poor greed becomes jealousy.
They feel cheated, they want to kick the table and start a new deal (speaking in poker terms). Politicians appear who tell them they are right, and that they will change the situation. Well, if they get votes it gets funny, because there is no way to keep the promise - politicians can make the rich poor, but not the other way. Promises can be only kept by raising taxes and this of course only works for a limited amount of time.
It seems that Estonia somehow avoided this problem (they have linear tax!). I am curious why and whether they will have to deal with it in the future.