Honestly, the DMCA is the best thing to happen to the net. Why? Because instead of everyone suing everyone for everything, it provides a fair method of resolving disputes... How nice is it that the plaintiff has to make a statement under penalty of perjury that you need to take something down, and also provides a formal way to refute the request? What would you prefer? The RIAA method of threatening to sue and just hoping people settle?
Granted, the fact that the DMCA gives DRM the force of law (among a few other things) makes the bill as a whole terrible. However, as far as the net in general has been concerned, it has helped a lot of content sites flourish without the risk of being sued into the ground as soon as a copyrighted work shows up.
I am surprised that no one pointed this out yet, but eV is a unit of energy; it is the energy of one electron accelerated across one Volt. So the relevant equation here is Power = Energy/Time. Thus the real equation is:
energy (Energy) * flux (# of particles / time)
However, as current is, essentially, a charge flux, the particle flux is:
current (Charge/time) / particle_charge (Charge)
However, you ended up with the right answer because the particle_charge term you neglected is equal to the one you neglected in the energy term (E=charge*Volts) namely the elementary charge. So to write the whole thing out:
energy * current / particle_charge
(elementary_charge * voltage) * current / particle_charge
When particle_charge==elementary_charge:
voltage * current
It's a little pedantic, but it is important to note that eV != V, and also that if they accelerate something other than protons or electrons, then your simplistic calculation would be wrong (through at that point Amps is a somewhat ambiguous/improper measurement and probably wouldn't be given anyway).
That's true, in part, but the difficulty is that I don't get to choose what commercials I watch. So even though there are some truly horrific shows out there, I just don't watch them. Even if the worst commercial ever produced is only 1/10 as bad, it could still play during a show I do watch, therefore exposing me to it (unless I have a DVR). Therefore, of what I see (rather than TV in general) commercials are usually the worst part. And that's not even getting in to how repetitive they become...
You seem to be assuming that these parts are readily available. Most likely, they have been long obsolete are almost impossible to find, if not truly so. As replacing legacy systems is often very expensive (esp. for the military, where it often isn't an option), such chips can easily go for hundreds of dollars, if not thousands and are only purchased in small quantities. I worked for a small business that needed such replacements for maintenance on a military project, and we got fakes for approx $350 each. Luckily we knew about these scams, tested them, and then got the credit card company to do a charge back.
So, this is rather unsurprising to me, at least for the Navy. Why a vacuum cleaner manufacturer would need such parts I don't know. However, I'm fairly certain these weren't $10 chips that are currently available by the thousand from the manufacturer
As someone who leans libertarian on some things, I don't really agree that this is so terrible. Honestly, is it fair or reasonable that an _insurance_ company cover the expenses of something that is guaranteed to happen? Shouldn't they adjust their rates based on you genetic predisposition to something, the same way that, for example, car insurance does for bad drivers?
If we decide, as a society, that treating people with genetic diseases is beneficial to us, then we should directly support it, rather than hiding it from insurance companies so we can all (well, those with insurance) pay for it anyway.
(And yes, I would support this. I think that the principal problem with health insurance companies is that they don't provide insurance, but rather care, making this stuff a big issue when it doesn't have to be.)
You kid, and I can appreciate the humor, but it was stated that way as a matter of journalistic integrity. Rather than claiming the the true Dan Morrill posted this (which they have no proof of) they stated what they did know: the person that posted this says he's Dan Morrill. That way if it turns out that Dan Morrill didn't actually post it, they've not put word into someone's mouth, as it were, and only need to release an update along the lines of "Bug discoverer really someone else".
It's sad that we've become so used to the modern media's 'report what you think happened and maybe correct yourself later if you're called on it' style that phrases like this are actually worthy of comment, humorous or otherwise....
Did your computer have an FPU? You cellphone doesn't, so despite it's 200+MHz(?) clock, you'll be lucky to get much past 10MFLOP/s, especially since the library code may often miss the cache (it's pretty limited on ARM). Also, POV scenes frequently use parametric surfaces, rather than meshes, making calculations easier and much less memory intensive than the high-poly meshes used in the demo scenes.
So, maybe a month may be a bit long, but I don't really think that it'd be able to do much better than a week per frame. (Especially since the only way it'd be able to store the data (mesh and texture) would be an SD card, which ain't quick either).
How doesn't it work both ways? They give you $X as a sort of signing bonus, knowing that across two years they will make that back. Do you think it's unfair that you can't just walk away with that money the next month? Isn't it only reasonable they get back the money they gave you (prorated even, IIRC) if you don't fulfill the expectations of the contract?
Contrary to the GP's post, the penalty is, in principle, because of the phone subsidy. Ongoing general service or support contracts rarely have severance penalties (for the customer, at least). Yes, there is a small benefit in so far as the (purely psychological) lock in, but it's completely necessary from a financial standpoint. If you don't like it, you can go drop $400 cash on a new phone and join on a prepaid service. They can be quite reasonable depending on your usage, and you can walk away if you don't like the service.
The point is that they don't disable the data, but rather let you use it and set a fairly huge and costly (without a plan) minimum, so when you accidentally hit the wrong button they make pretty good money (esp. when added across all their subscribers). According to a friend on Verizon, this is fairly standard fare.
As far as the termination penalty is concerned, I couldn't agree more. When a contract offers a concession upfront, early termination almost invariably involves a penalty on the order of that concession.
Apparently you are the one that knows nothing about the US system of governance:
United States Department of Justice: "The United States Department of Justice... is the United States federal executive department responsible for the enforcement of the law and administration of justice... The Department is led by the Attorney General, who is nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate and is a member of the Cabinet." Emphasis mine.
The federal judiciary branch is the supreme court; the DOJ is an extension of the executive branch into judicial affairs. However, law enforcement has traditionally fallen to the executive branch, so the DOJ's existence is arguably appropriate.
This is not to say that Obama ordered this, but as he is the CEO, if you will, and appointed the guy that directly oversees it, he definitely bears some responsibility. As this particular case is not terribly high profile, he probably wasn't briefed or asked about it. Regardless, it is certainly within his power to tell them to stop.
> But this delineation is entirely arbitrary, based on "what would make a significant > number of people uncomfortable" rather than on science. Are they human beings at 25 > weeks? Not human beings at 23?
Well, scientifically, they are developing, so if they are certainly human beings after birth, and not before conception, they are some fraction thereof (0-100% inclusive) during the interim. One could, I suppose, construct a sort of Schrodinger's baby scenario to determine percent humanity based on probability of successful birth, but what's the point? Unless abortions are categorically illegal or you're allowed to club babies on the way out you'll need to draw a firm line somewhere, and, no matter how scientific the basis, it'll be arbitrary.
Your answer is worthless: of course cell phones can cause accidents. The question posed was not whether they can cause accidents, or even if they _do_ cause accidents. The question is whether the introduction of cell phones has _increased_ overall accident rates. In other words, are cellphones just another drop in the distraction bucket? Without cellphones, would these bad drivers be reading the newspaper, shaving, doing their hair, etc. or would they be good drivers? For some reason I have a hard time believing the latter...
I doubt they ever will. You see, they spend so much time making up statistics and figures about the problems of piracy, they can not believe that statistics showing _positive_ aspects of piracy are anything but made up as well. So, they have to defer to the most basic facts in the situation: people have got their stuff and didn't pay them for it, and therefore piracy is bad.
As I recall, the Glider decision actual is more disturbing. Essentially, they sidestepped section 117 altogether and basically said that the RAM copy is a full blown copy, and is only made legally because the ELUA allows such use. As Glider violated the EULA, making a RAM copy of WoW infringed on Blizzard's copyright.
So not only is making a RAM copy infringement (without a license) ELUA's are also implicitly upheld. Lovely.
On somewhat unrelated, but interesting note: Now that SSDs (and, potentially PRAM) are picking of speed, it may well be possible to to run programs directly off the HD. This would completely sidestep all this 'copying to RAM is infringement' BS
There are also lots of other reasons beyond security (as dedicated routers can be hacked too, of course): *) Stability: I don't want my whole network going down because I installed some updates or have bad software, poorly cooled hardware, etc. *) Power consumption: I don't want a 100+W system on 24/7 just to maintain my network. *) Hardware suitability: I don't want to need to have all my network stuff (wires, modem, etc) sitting under/near my desk when I can have my hub tucked away in a closet. Also, I don't want to have a bunch of NICs in my computer, using up slots and causing potential power problems.
Those are just what I can think of, but that's more than enough for me. It's not as if this situation is anything new anyway... I used Internet Connection Sharing about a decade ago so I could have more than one computer using the dial up. Once I got high speed I was glad to get a dedicated router box so that my computer was free from being the gateway. I cannot foresee this changing; while merging devices is good, modularity is often better.
Indeed. This is actually a very good idea, especially because it costs Nintendo very little but could (further) open up a largely untapped market segment.
I'm honestly rather surprised the blogger is upset by this; it's really just a different option, rather than "upgrade". It's like he's saying that a publisher should be out finding new books instead of making a large print version of an existing best seller.
Of course scams won't go away. But even if we accept that, should we just allow scams to continue unchecked? At least arresting scammers helps raise the "price" of the operation...
Also, for what it's worth, being scammed isn't about stupidity. The (Ponzi) scams that have been in the news tricked people whose sole area of expertise was investing, and they did it quite well (they had the millions to put in to these after all). Granted, dumb/ignorant people are easier targets, but they also don't generally yield as much per person (see pervious).
Actually, homeopathic remedies are surprisingly effective, and compete strongly with even the newest drugs. The story was posted here just recently:
Slashdot: Placebos Are Getting More Effective
Just because they're bogus science, not real medicine, etc. doesn't mean they don't work. The placebo effect can be very strong, and homeopathy causes in quite a lot of people. Take doesn't make it a replacement for real medicine, of course, but that doesn't mean it does not work.
> The thing that annoyed me the most about Star Trek, and it was most common in the Next Generation, was > the idiotic idea of solving a made-up scientific problem with made-up technology. It has no value to a > plot; actually it's the opposite of plot, if there is such a thing.
"contrived" is probably the word you're looking for.
However, how contrived the plot is isn't really the point; the real question is whether or not it makes good TV, and the proof is in the pudding (especially for TNG). TV shows are, after all, entertainment and not great literary works. (Indeed, the two don't frequently go hand-in-hand...)
Regardless, sci-fi generally means made-up technology, and made-up technology problems. Sometimes these can be/are solved by going back to human ingenuity or 'old-school' tech, but sometimes they need to be solved with more made-up technology. That's just kinda how things go. For example, if you had someone hacking your critical (pulling the plug isn't an option) system, you may have to, say, "reconfigure the firewall". If this were the 1920's and computers were made-up technology, then the whole situation would appear contrived, though from our perspective it's not.
> Having open drivers allows you to upgrade the kernel, which as you pointed out might be subject to incompatible changes..
Well, perhaps I should have clarified:
In an embedded device, the hardware is what it is. Nothing get added, nothing gets removed, and there is only one configuration. Because of this, you don't even need a driver model; you can just hard code everything into whatever layer the driver would plug into. Ergo, whatever incompatible changes may come about in the kernel can simply be hacked out/around to make the drivers work. That is to say, instead of modifying the drivers you can modify the kernel. Not, perhaps, as elegant or easy, but not any huge deal either.
> It also allows you to change the kernel, what if someone wanted to put OpenBSD or something else on this device?
Fair enough, however, a rather minor problem in the grand scheme of things. Anyways, if you're doing all that work porting over BSD, would it really be so much harder to change it's driver model to linux's than change the driver's linux interface to a BSD one? (honest, if retorical, question; I've never hacked BSD)
> Also, hardware where the only difference between a $100 card and a $1000 card are the drivers is a total scam... > [snip] > Trying to scam extra money out of people in this way is not good for the buyer, and not a practice anyone would want to support.
Well, this point is actually arguable. First of all, a large part of these workstation cards _is_ the drivers (in so far as what they're optimized for). Second, the large profit from the workstation card supplements the income from the gamer card, thereby allowing the latter to sell for a lower price while the former is sold to people who actually willingly pay the high price (as it helps their productivity). So, maybe it's a little sleazy, but really, it benefits the average consumer.
Blaming 'Big Oil' is fun and all, but come on. Hybridization generally cuts gas consumption by less than 50%, and that's only in their mid-sized sedan class. Trucks (big-rig and pickup), trains, planes, clunkers, etc. still burn lots of gas, I doubt that hybrids would make Exxon blink an eye.
It you're really looking for some kind of conspiracy, the American auto makers would be the best place. This little company is trying to prevent the sale/import of Toyota's cars, rather than just collecting royalties. There are only two possible explanations: a) they're getting big money from other automakers to remove Toyota from the market, or b) they're do some serious hardball trolling. Still, the latter is more likely.
> They are proclaiming it to be open source, which is deceptive. It's "open source" except > where it matters (device drivers/modules) from a maintainability perspective.
Open source drivers do not add much maintainability on an embedded system such as this. What does the openness get you other then, perhaps, the ability to correct for incompatible changes in the kernel? It's not like the hardware is going to get swapped out or updated, and realistically there isn't likely a whole lot of new functionality to unlock as network drivers are, at this point, quite mature.
Sure, it would have been nice for them to be open, but this is a decent start to getting open source, (legitimately) hackable devices. This concept of all or nothing with regards to openness of source is a losing strategy. Honestly, (it's sad to say) we should really be glad whenever someone makes a device that doesn't cryptographically sign all their firmwares.
P.S. The reason for keeping drivers closed isn't about revealing inner workings of your chip. With devices established as they are, it tends to be _far_ more work to reverse engineer someone else's new features and try to work them into your (sometimes drastically) different chip than it is to just do a clean room implementation. The primary reason tends to be preventing Chinese knockoffs by carefully controlling minor defects in the hardware, which are then checked/used by the drivers. Less commonly, you can have cases where the hardware in two models differs only by a pull-up resistor which is checked by the driver to enable certain advanced functionality (e.g. ATI's $100 Radeon vs. $1000 FireGL). So there are reasons beyond simple paranoia...
For the last decade there has been no global warming, at all, while producing more CO2 than ever. During that decade we have taken measurements with the goal of testing global warming, and found none. These measurements are taken from all over the world, and are the most accurate and analyzable (for sources of error, etc.) that we have or will have. The have uncovered _global cooling_.
Scientifically, this _necessarily_ throws global warming into serious doubt. The assertion that global warming exists cannot be made without correcting the errors in the old GW model to properly align with our current observations. The idea that some old temperature logs made with an uncalibrated thermometer by someone without a particular interest in accuracy could overshadow careful modern measurements is a sick joke.
The real deniers at this point are the ones that insist that global warming is a fact.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, the DMCA is the best thing to happen to the net. Why? Because instead of everyone suing everyone for everything, it provides a fair method of resolving disputes... How nice is it that the plaintiff has to make a statement under penalty of perjury that you need to take something down, and also provides a formal way to refute the request? What would you prefer? The RIAA method of threatening to sue and just hoping people settle?
Granted, the fact that the DMCA gives DRM the force of law (among a few other things) makes the bill as a whole terrible. However, as far as the net in general has been concerned, it has helped a lot of content sites flourish without the risk of being sued into the ground as soon as a copyrighted work shows up.
I am surprised that no one pointed this out yet, but eV is a unit of energy; it is the energy of one electron accelerated across one Volt. So the relevant equation here is Power = Energy/Time. Thus the real equation is:
energy (Energy) * flux (# of particles / time)
However, as current is, essentially, a charge flux, the particle flux is:
current (Charge/time) / particle_charge (Charge)
However, you ended up with the right answer because the particle_charge term you neglected is equal to the one you neglected in the energy term (E=charge*Volts) namely the elementary charge. So to write the whole thing out:
energy * current / particle_charge
(elementary_charge * voltage) * current / particle_charge
When particle_charge==elementary_charge:
voltage * current
It's a little pedantic, but it is important to note that eV != V, and also that if they accelerate something other than protons or electrons, then your simplistic calculation would be wrong (through at that point Amps is a somewhat ambiguous/improper measurement and probably wouldn't be given anyway).
That's true, in part, but the difficulty is that I don't get to choose what commercials I watch. So even though there are some truly horrific shows out there, I just don't watch them. Even if the worst commercial ever produced is only 1/10 as bad, it could still play during a show I do watch, therefore exposing me to it (unless I have a DVR). Therefore, of what I see (rather than TV in general) commercials are usually the worst part. And that's not even getting in to how repetitive they become...
You seem to be assuming that these parts are readily available. Most likely, they have been long obsolete are almost impossible to find, if not truly so. As replacing legacy systems is often very expensive (esp. for the military, where it often isn't an option), such chips can easily go for hundreds of dollars, if not thousands and are only purchased in small quantities. I worked for a small business that needed such replacements for maintenance on a military project, and we got fakes for approx $350 each. Luckily we knew about these scams, tested them, and then got the credit card company to do a charge back.
So, this is rather unsurprising to me, at least for the Navy. Why a vacuum cleaner manufacturer would need such parts I don't know. However, I'm fairly certain these weren't $10 chips that are currently available by the thousand from the manufacturer
As someone who leans libertarian on some things, I don't really agree that this is so terrible. Honestly, is it fair or reasonable that an _insurance_ company cover the expenses of something that is guaranteed to happen? Shouldn't they adjust their rates based on you genetic predisposition to something, the same way that, for example, car insurance does for bad drivers?
If we decide, as a society, that treating people with genetic diseases is beneficial to us, then we should directly support it, rather than hiding it from insurance companies so we can all (well, those with insurance) pay for it anyway.
(And yes, I would support this. I think that the principal problem with health insurance companies is that they don't provide insurance, but rather care, making this stuff a big issue when it doesn't have to be.)
You kid, and I can appreciate the humor, but it was stated that way as a matter of journalistic integrity. Rather than claiming the the true Dan Morrill posted this (which they have no proof of) they stated what they did know: the person that posted this says he's Dan Morrill. That way if it turns out that Dan Morrill didn't actually post it, they've not put word into someone's mouth, as it were, and only need to release an update along the lines of "Bug discoverer really someone else".
It's sad that we've become so used to the modern media's 'report what you think happened and maybe correct yourself later if you're called on it' style that phrases like this are actually worthy of comment, humorous or otherwise....
Did your computer have an FPU? You cellphone doesn't, so despite it's 200+MHz(?) clock, you'll be lucky to get much past 10MFLOP/s, especially since the library code may often miss the cache (it's pretty limited on ARM). Also, POV scenes frequently use parametric surfaces, rather than meshes, making calculations easier and much less memory intensive than the high-poly meshes used in the demo scenes.
So, maybe a month may be a bit long, but I don't really think that it'd be able to do much better than a week per frame. (Especially since the only way it'd be able to store the data (mesh and texture) would be an SD card, which ain't quick either).
Like bullets? Or would only a throwing ax count as hacking?
How doesn't it work both ways? They give you $X as a sort of signing bonus, knowing that across two years they will make that back. Do you think it's unfair that you can't just walk away with that money the next month? Isn't it only reasonable they get back the money they gave you (prorated even, IIRC) if you don't fulfill the expectations of the contract?
Contrary to the GP's post, the penalty is, in principle, because of the phone subsidy. Ongoing general service or support contracts rarely have severance penalties (for the customer, at least). Yes, there is a small benefit in so far as the (purely psychological) lock in, but it's completely necessary from a financial standpoint. If you don't like it, you can go drop $400 cash on a new phone and join on a prepaid service. They can be quite reasonable depending on your usage, and you can walk away if you don't like the service.
The point is that they don't disable the data, but rather let you use it and set a fairly huge and costly (without a plan) minimum, so when you accidentally hit the wrong button they make pretty good money (esp. when added across all their subscribers). According to a friend on Verizon, this is fairly standard fare.
As far as the termination penalty is concerned, I couldn't agree more. When a contract offers a concession upfront, early termination almost invariably involves a penalty on the order of that concession.
Apparently you are the one that knows nothing about the US system of governance:
United States Department of Justice: "The United States Department of Justice ... is the United States federal executive department responsible for the enforcement of the law and administration of justice... The Department is led by the Attorney General, who is nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate and is a member of the Cabinet." Emphasis mine.
The federal judiciary branch is the supreme court; the DOJ is an extension of the executive branch into judicial affairs. However, law enforcement has traditionally fallen to the executive branch, so the DOJ's existence is arguably appropriate.
This is not to say that Obama ordered this, but as he is the CEO, if you will, and appointed the guy that directly oversees it, he definitely bears some responsibility. As this particular case is not terribly high profile, he probably wasn't briefed or asked about it. Regardless, it is certainly within his power to tell them to stop.
> But this delineation is entirely arbitrary, based on "what would make a significant
> number of people uncomfortable" rather than on science. Are they human beings at 25
> weeks? Not human beings at 23?
Well, scientifically, they are developing, so if they are certainly human beings after birth, and not before conception, they are some fraction thereof (0-100% inclusive) during the interim. One could, I suppose, construct a sort of Schrodinger's baby scenario to determine percent humanity based on probability of successful birth, but what's the point? Unless abortions are categorically illegal or you're allowed to club babies on the way out you'll need to draw a firm line somewhere, and, no matter how scientific the basis, it'll be arbitrary.
Your answer is worthless: of course cell phones can cause accidents. The question posed was not whether they can cause accidents, or even if they _do_ cause accidents. The question is whether the introduction of cell phones has _increased_ overall accident rates. In other words, are cellphones just another drop in the distraction bucket? Without cellphones, would these bad drivers be reading the newspaper, shaving, doing their hair, etc. or would they be good drivers? For some reason I have a hard time believing the latter...
I doubt they ever will. You see, they spend so much time making up statistics and figures about the problems of piracy, they can not believe that statistics showing _positive_ aspects of piracy are anything but made up as well. So, they have to defer to the most basic facts in the situation: people have got their stuff and didn't pay them for it, and therefore piracy is bad.
As I recall, the Glider decision actual is more disturbing. Essentially, they sidestepped section 117 altogether and basically said that the RAM copy is a full blown copy, and is only made legally because the ELUA allows such use. As Glider violated the EULA, making a RAM copy of WoW infringed on Blizzard's copyright.
So not only is making a RAM copy infringement (without a license) ELUA's are also implicitly upheld. Lovely.
On somewhat unrelated, but interesting note: Now that SSDs (and, potentially PRAM) are picking of speed, it may well be possible to to run programs directly off the HD. This would completely sidestep all this 'copying to RAM is infringement' BS
Sorry, typo. I meant stability problems.
There are also lots of other reasons beyond security (as dedicated routers can be hacked too, of course):
*) Stability: I don't want my whole network going down because I installed some updates or have bad software, poorly cooled hardware, etc.
*) Power consumption: I don't want a 100+W system on 24/7 just to maintain my network.
*) Hardware suitability: I don't want to need to have all my network stuff (wires, modem, etc) sitting under/near my desk when I can have my hub tucked away in a closet. Also, I don't want to have a bunch of NICs in my computer, using up slots and causing potential power problems.
Those are just what I can think of, but that's more than enough for me. It's not as if this situation is anything new anyway... I used Internet Connection Sharing about a decade ago so I could have more than one computer using the dial up. Once I got high speed I was glad to get a dedicated router box so that my computer was free from being the gateway. I cannot foresee this changing; while merging devices is good, modularity is often better.
Indeed. This is actually a very good idea, especially because it costs Nintendo very little but could (further) open up a largely untapped market segment.
I'm honestly rather surprised the blogger is upset by this; it's really just a different option, rather than "upgrade". It's like he's saying that a publisher should be out finding new books instead of making a large print version of an existing best seller.
Of course scams won't go away. But even if we accept that, should we just allow scams to continue unchecked? At least arresting scammers helps raise the "price" of the operation...
Also, for what it's worth, being scammed isn't about stupidity. The (Ponzi) scams that have been in the news tricked people whose sole area of expertise was investing, and they did it quite well (they had the millions to put in to these after all). Granted, dumb/ignorant people are easier targets, but they also don't generally yield as much per person (see pervious).
Actually, homeopathic remedies are surprisingly effective, and compete strongly with even the newest drugs. The story was posted here just recently:
Slashdot: Placebos Are Getting More Effective
Just because they're bogus science, not real medicine, etc. doesn't mean they don't work. The placebo effect can be very strong, and homeopathy causes in quite a lot of people. Take doesn't make it a replacement for real medicine, of course, but that doesn't mean it does not work.
> The thing that annoyed me the most about Star Trek, and it was most common in the Next Generation, was
> the idiotic idea of solving a made-up scientific problem with made-up technology. It has no value to a
> plot; actually it's the opposite of plot, if there is such a thing.
"contrived" is probably the word you're looking for.
However, how contrived the plot is isn't really the point; the real question is whether or not it makes good TV, and the proof is in the pudding (especially for TNG). TV shows are, after all, entertainment and not great literary works. (Indeed, the two don't frequently go hand-in-hand...)
Regardless, sci-fi generally means made-up technology, and made-up technology problems. Sometimes these can be/are solved by going back to human ingenuity or 'old-school' tech, but sometimes they need to be solved with more made-up technology. That's just kinda how things go. For example, if you had someone hacking your critical (pulling the plug isn't an option) system, you may have to, say, "reconfigure the firewall". If this were the 1920's and computers were made-up technology, then the whole situation would appear contrived, though from our perspective it's not.
> Having open drivers allows you to upgrade the kernel, which as you pointed out might be subject to incompatible changes..
Well, perhaps I should have clarified:
In an embedded device, the hardware is what it is. Nothing get added, nothing gets removed, and there is only one configuration. Because of this, you don't even need a driver model; you can just hard code everything into whatever layer the driver would plug into. Ergo, whatever incompatible changes may come about in the kernel can simply be hacked out/around to make the drivers work. That is to say, instead of modifying the drivers you can modify the kernel. Not, perhaps, as elegant or easy, but not any huge deal either.
> It also allows you to change the kernel, what if someone wanted to put OpenBSD or something else on this device?
Fair enough, however, a rather minor problem in the grand scheme of things. Anyways, if you're doing all that work porting over BSD, would it really be so much harder to change it's driver model to linux's than change the driver's linux interface to a BSD one? (honest, if retorical, question; I've never hacked BSD)
> Also, hardware where the only difference between a $100 card and a $1000 card are the drivers is a total scam...
> [snip]
> Trying to scam extra money out of people in this way is not good for the buyer, and not a practice anyone would want to support.
Well, this point is actually arguable. First of all, a large part of these workstation cards _is_ the drivers (in so far as what they're optimized for). Second, the large profit from the workstation card supplements the income from the gamer card, thereby allowing the latter to sell for a lower price while the former is sold to people who actually willingly pay the high price (as it helps their productivity). So, maybe it's a little sleazy, but really, it benefits the average consumer.
Blaming 'Big Oil' is fun and all, but come on. Hybridization generally cuts gas consumption by less than 50%, and that's only in their mid-sized sedan class. Trucks (big-rig and pickup), trains, planes, clunkers, etc. still burn lots of gas, I doubt that hybrids would make Exxon blink an eye.
It you're really looking for some kind of conspiracy, the American auto makers would be the best place. This little company is trying to prevent the sale/import of Toyota's cars, rather than just collecting royalties. There are only two possible explanations: a) they're getting big money from other automakers to remove Toyota from the market, or b) they're do some serious hardball trolling. Still, the latter is more likely.
> They are proclaiming it to be open source, which is deceptive. It's "open source" except
> where it matters (device drivers/modules) from a maintainability perspective.
Open source drivers do not add much maintainability on an embedded system such as this. What does the openness get you other then, perhaps, the ability to correct for incompatible changes in the kernel? It's not like the hardware is going to get swapped out or updated, and realistically there isn't likely a whole lot of new functionality to unlock as network drivers are, at this point, quite mature.
Sure, it would have been nice for them to be open, but this is a decent start to getting open source, (legitimately) hackable devices. This concept of all or nothing with regards to openness of source is a losing strategy. Honestly, (it's sad to say) we should really be glad whenever someone makes a device that doesn't cryptographically sign all their firmwares.
P.S. The reason for keeping drivers closed isn't about revealing inner workings of your chip. With devices established as they are, it tends to be _far_ more work to reverse engineer someone else's new features and try to work them into your (sometimes drastically) different chip than it is to just do a clean room implementation. The primary reason tends to be preventing Chinese knockoffs by carefully controlling minor defects in the hardware, which are then checked/used by the drivers. Less commonly, you can have cases where the hardware in two models differs only by a pull-up resistor which is checked by the driver to enable certain advanced functionality (e.g. ATI's $100 Radeon vs. $1000 FireGL). So there are reasons beyond simple paranoia...
For the last decade there has been no global warming, at all, while producing more CO2 than ever. During that decade we have taken measurements with the goal of testing global warming, and found none. These measurements are taken from all over the world, and are the most accurate and analyzable (for sources of error, etc.) that we have or will have. The have uncovered _global cooling_.
Scientifically, this _necessarily_ throws global warming into serious doubt. The assertion that global warming exists cannot be made without correcting the errors in the old GW model to properly align with our current observations. The idea that some old temperature logs made with an uncalibrated thermometer by someone without a particular interest in accuracy could overshadow careful modern measurements is a sick joke.
The real deniers at this point are the ones that insist that global warming is a fact.