My top 10 list is more of issues to be addressed rather than specific actions to be taken:
1. Global warming and the environment. There are billions of dollars worth of real estate that are going to be underwater on the US coastline in about 50 years. The official estimates still say around 100 years, but every time I turn around, the current state of global warming is that it's happening faster than we expected. We have to stop burning fossil fuels ASAP, and possibly begin funding dikes around metropolitan areas. Mass transit also needs to be a component, once we convince people outside the northeast and Chicago that it isn't a lower-class phenomenon.
2. The poisonous atmosphere in Washington and in the political media. Not much a president can do about this other than lead by example.
3. Iraq - Needs a cold, hard, non-partisan look coupled with a dose of "if you break it, you buy it". I can't endorse the blind following of reprehensible Bush administration policies, nor can I endorse withdrawing from Iraq without restoring some level of order there. If we're lucky, the violence will settle down now that the initial blood-bath is over. But the Middle East is not a region known for letting go of old grudges.
4. The Federal budget - End the exclusion of military spending from the deficit calculations. We NEED some new taxes (or some old ones like the estate tax restored) to pay this off. I'd rather be "tax and spend" rather than "spend and go bankrupt".
5. The "war on terror" - start the process of reconciling ourselves with the international community. The neo-Con philosophy that the US can do whatever the hell it wants is completely discredited now.
6. Insurance of various types - "Insurance" has traditionally been a form of protection against statistically rare events. Health coverage doesn't really qualify as insurance now that so much of it is preventative or long-term. Natural disasters of all types should be covered in a national pool. Every region of the country has one or more types of natural disaster that is more prevalent in that area than in other parts of the country. Pooling the risks for hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, mudslides and earthquakes, sinkholes, floods and other "acts of god" on a national basis in a single program makes sense.
7. Immigration - apart from the question of how to handle the illegals, we need to boost legal immigration for two big reasons: 1) to better balance our labor costs with the global market (although no politician can say that) and avoid cross-border job losses, and 2) to get "all those damn furriners takin' our jobs" to at least be paying U.S. taxes, rather than Indian or Chinese taxes.
8. Social Security and Medicare - We need more workers (another reason to increase immigration), we need to remove the taxation cap, and we need to pay a little bit less out in retirement benefits. We need to roll Medicare into a more universal coverage system where the premiums for the healthier, younger folks help offset the costs for the elderly.
9. Corporate and Securities Law - There are several issues underlying the weirdness in the economy over the past decade. The disconnect between ownership and management of corporations has become too great. In the financial industry is it time to decouple the insurers from the brokerages and both of those from the banks again? The concentration of power in this industry is at least as dangerous to a free society as the concentration of power in the media. These guys have proven (yet again) that they can't control their greed, and it's too easy for them to bring the whole economy down. And yes, we need some new usury laws.
10. Legalize it: curtail the war on drugs to only target those drugs that cause near-term physical harm. Stuff that literally kills you or renders you incapacitated in a year or three. Stuff that's physically addictive on the order of heroin or morphine would probably qualify as illegal, but not marijuana and possibly some forms of cocaine, hallucinogens like LSD and others.
There is no way to associate the watermark with "your details" unless the retailers report back to them every purchase by every customer. And if you pay cash, then what?...or is that illegal now?
I suppose that once you've been tracked buying one item, they could fake a purchase on their own online store and then put the watermarked file out on the internet. But why would they do that? These guys have been aggressive, but it's always been about preserving their access to the revenue stream as it transitions to digital distribution. When they've sued the wrong people, it's because of their low-budget approach to evidence-gathering more than an attempt to pick members of the general public at random. Even if they're convinced you're the world's most prolific media pirate and they need to take you down, they've got a better chance of getting you on the stuff you've actually ripped and distributed, rather than some bogus paper trail that would take months to set up.
If I were being paranoid, I'd be more concerned about the watermarking scheme coupled with a rootkit to see exactly what fair-use format conversions you're doing. Or whether you're ripping disks you've borrowed from your local library. That would tempt them both from a copy-enforcement and a market-research point of view. And even if they don't uniquely identify individual disks sold to consumers, they may opt for other approaches in relation to libraries, rentals or download services.
I have to give them credit for finding a method of copy auditing that responds to the needs of both the market and their lawyers. It's early days to say whether it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, but at least they're finally breaking out of their old mindset and accepting the new distribution model.
Are you saying that if they use an encrypted, possibly steganized watermark on a lossy format like mpg or jpg, you'll be able to separate the watermark from the signal and tamper with the watermark? Yeah you can tell which bits have flipped between two versions of the recording, but if they make the watermark size large enough (say 1024 bit) so that the variations can exceed the number of copies sold by a few orders of magnitude, yet small enough so that it can be randomly scattered around the medium, how are you going to tamper with a watermark without leaving a trace? And you'd have to get digital copies of multiple versions of the media. It isn't like Wi-Fi packet sniffing where you can just download data for about 1/2 an hour and you've cracked the system. You need thousands or millions of different versions of the same song/disc to decipher any meaning from the discrepancies.
In the old days, you could say just wait a few years and the CPUs will take care of it. But it looks like we're getting near the end of Moore's law: while processor feature sizes continue to decrease, the clock rate is no longer increasing as fast, so they're forced to use multi-core and other workarounds. And given that for a CD we're talking 600-700 MB, and for DVD and HD (pick your format) we're talking 4-20 GB, it's trivial to hide a signature several kilobits long in there.
The one catch is that they have to enable a robust encryption system. If they candy-ass it like with CSS on DVDs, eventually it'll get out. On the other hand, there are more countries that have anti-circumvention laws, so even then there may not be any takers.
The prima-donna hackers (assuming they actually can walk the talk) will give you the fastest performance and churn out code quickly. But it will be code that only they can support, and in some cases only they can run it. Send them to work for an OS, game or compiler vendor.
The diversified engineers can give you things more valuable than code, like documentation, structure and conformance to requirements and standards. But their code output and the performance of their programs will be slower.
"Evolutionism" requires faith in the work of hundreds of scientists interpreting the present and making educated guesses about the past. No one saw man created out of dirt and breathed to life by God, but by the same token, no one saw a single-celled organism spring to life in the primordial soup and continue re-writing itself until it became a human.
Neither group actually "knows" how these things came to be, they've just adopted a view of it that they are comfortable with. What I don't understand is how the evolutionists, who are supposed to be the more objective and open minded of the two groups, can be so "holier than thou" as to suggest that the creationists' theory doesn't even deserve a place.
Nice try. The one thing you got right is that math, and everything else in science is a model of reality and not the actual thing itself. The same applies to creationism and religion. Religion is a model of reality, regardless of whether you are a believer or not. If you are a believer, religion is simply your (or your church leaders') best understanding of God's design and will for you and the universe. Or are you saying that believers automatically have a perfect understanding of the reality of God's will? For the believer, religion is a human model for understanding God and the universe. If you're a non-believer, god gets removed from the equation: religion is a human model for understanding the universe that has been superseded in most cases by science and the scientific method. So intelligent design gains no traction by declaring evolution as a "model". Intelligent design itself is a model, and should be evaluated by comparing the two models scientifically, not politically.
Evolution isn't just educated guesses about the past. There's the fossil record, there is the observation in the present day of mutation and natural selection in species ranging from bacteria to human. Bacteria are mutating and being selected for immunity to antibiotics. Human genes are still mutating at a rate comparable to that of other primates. And the measured rate of mutation in various species indicates species divergence that matches the fosssil record. In other words, we are finding common ancestor species in the fossil time frame where genomic theory predicts they should be.
The creationists continue to mis-use scientific terminology to cloud the issue in the public mind. For all practical purposes, a "theory" in science IS a fact. A theory represents the best available explanation of a natural process or phenomenon, and for elementary school students and the general public it might as well be a fact. Gravity, the laws of thermodynamics and mass-energy conversion are theories, and evolution stands as a peer to those based on over a century of scientific study and measurement. The disproving of scientific theories is always possible, but it's an activity best left to people experienced in the use of the scientific method, not by clouding the minds of primary and secondary school students.
What the creationists have isn't a theory, and to give it scientific equivalence to the theory of evolution in our primary and secondary schools is a farce. While some studies of creationism and intelligent design have been conducted, the results don't provide enough (or even any) evidence to raise creationism or intelligent design to the level of a theory. In scientific terminology, intelligent design is at best a hypothesis: an educated guess that needs to be tested and evaluated further.
The difficulty is that intelligent design and creationism have not yielded any statements that can be verified by experiment. This isn't saying that the experiments have failed, it's saying no one has been able to design an experiment yet to adequately prove it one way or the other in areas where it contradicts the theory of evolution. The main tenet of intelligent design is that plain old evolution by random mutation and natural selection can't be true because it the rate of evolution from primit
That's another good point, although once you get to compiler design, you better know already how to manage pointers and references. But for the pure software folks, developing a simple compiler might be preferable to a microprocessor oriented course.
Well, if the students were drinking as an act of civil disobedience, maybe I could go along with the problem being the system. But the school is involved because the students are in clubs and athletic teams that have rules about underage drinking, distinct from general school rules or the public laws against it. The rules that resulted in their suspensions were not in force only by virtue of them being underage, the students voluntarily signed up for activities that demanded that they abide by those rules. Life is full of choices, and sometimes none of the options are palatable. "Let's see, do I confront my wretched adolescent life head-on and endure the pain, or do I anesthetize my self with some medicinal beer." at one end of the spectrum, and "Let's see, do I like Lacrosse enough to give up drinking?" at the other end of the spectrum.
Yeah kids are stupid. That's why the rules are there in the first place, to bring their stupidity to their attention before it has a more lasting effect in the real world. Some levels of stupidity in the real world can get you the death penalty, enforced either by the state or by the semi that hits you as you run the red light. There may be some nits to pick among the details of the case (for example, game suspensions for drinking that occurred prior to joining the team?), but the general process here is sound.
Move along, there's nothing to see here. Some kids went out drinking and their doofus friend posted pictures of it, and they got busted. It happens all the time, and it's not a cause celebre.
Apart from sanitizing their input, why aren't they sanitizing their permissions? If a web app only has access to a database via stored procedures, they can't even look at the table except through the stored procs. So your read-only data stays read-only. You'd still be vulnerable in user-submitted content for which your procedure is designed to allow updates to string or text data on a particular table, but even there the procedure can limit scope by (for example) only allowing updates to records belonging to the user ID. And for some applications, this requires a DBMS that allows large objects to be passed to a procedure, which isn't guaranteed.
I think the answer is: no, that's not allowed. They are allowed to search in order to satisfy themselves that it is a book/document and not something nefarious (bomb, contraband, etc.)... but beyond that they cannot go rummaging through any data you happen to be carrying on your person.
Obviously UANAL. I'm not either, but this isn't the FBI/DOJ searching, this is the Customs service (part of the treasury department). They are pretty much allowed to do everything short of a body-cavity search with no probable cause. And probable cause can be "he was acting nervous and his answers sounded suspicious".
The primary purpose is to search for any kind of contraband, not just stuff that's completely banned. Apart from terrorist documents, this can include undeclared items on which duty is owed, pr0n that offends the community standards (of which the kiddies would be a sub-set), agricultural products that may be infested with vermin, items pirated or counterfeited (that Gucci handbag you picked up at the flea market in Paris, as well as the DVDs from Shanghai) and weapons. The original intent of this was to ensure that the government got its cut, but the scope was expanded when items like drugs and weapons started to get banned in the US.
From the court's perspective, opening a computer's HD is analogous to opening a chest full of documents, photos and videos and viewing every one. The level of privacy invaded by scanning a HD is no greater than opening and viewing a collection of love-letters, and they were already allowed to do that. Don't get your hopes up this will be overturned.
Is it the magnitude of the delta-v that causes it to be able to be treated as a scalar, or the fact that the delta-v is typically applied directly along the vector of velocity? (i.e. the rockets are oriented in parallel with the velocity vector before firing)
If I recall correctly, introductory programming classes are geared toward the mass of the student body and not really relevant to systems programming. And NONE of the languages traditionally taught in introductory programming (FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal, Java) use pointers the way they are used in C, C++ and Assembler. So the argument at that level is really moot.
The real question is: what is the first programming language that a computer science or engineering major should learn AFTER intro programming? While C could be considered "obsolete", I would still prefer it to C++ in this case, because C++ would give Java programmers a false sense of familiarity due to its object orientation. But even C introduces several permutations and uses of pointers that can be confusing. Pointers to arrays of function pointers, anyone?
Frankly, I'd prefer to see the CS and CSwEng majors get into a course on boolean logic and logical microprocessor architecture, with a simple assembly language like 6502 8-bit assembler used as the programming tool. It's easier to learn about pointers as indirect memory references when you only have to worry about the memory management involved in adding two arbitrary integers, and not have to worry about refactoring your objects and other complexities introduced by the higher level languages. Learning some simple assembler and architectural concepts would also help the comprehension of what is going on in C and C++ behind the scenes. For example, the short-hand notations for incrementing and decrementing numbers in C/C++ make more sense after seeing the corresponding assembler operations.
This whole thing sounds like it's in response to the irresponsible investigative techniques used by the RIAA, and the counterclaims filed by one of the defendants. I would've thought that/.ers would be jumping on this bandwagon right quick.
Nice concept for portability and low energy, but it needs to be updated to modern video resolutions. One year from now, just about everyone in their target market will have an HD flat panel (or multiple) and the output of this thing will look like crap by comparison. On the other hand, that's what they said about the Wii...a year ago.
Seriously, though. If you want to share video in a public place like a bus or a mall, you aren't going to project it on a surface anyone can see it on. You'd probably get arrested for not having a permit or sued for a copyright-infringing public presentation.
And if you want to do a projection in a slightly less public venue (say a friend's family room or a client's conference room), you'd expect better resolution. The product is too gadget-ty to attract the low-tech end of the mainstream and too low-res to attract the high-tech end. Maybe a market for a year or so until analog TV gets canned, then a narrowing market segment as DVD players phase out for HD (pick your format) and it becomes the lowest-res thing on the market.
If it was just Slashdotters that were no longer buying CDs, the RIAA wouldn't be so panicked. It's all the college students that can install a BitTorrent (or whatever) client and download music. It's all the people that buy music downloads from non-RIAA artists. It's even the legal download services that legally sell RIAA music, because the RIAA mindset still hasn't fully adopted that market strategy (hence DRM).
Actually, the other way around. K-Mart was going into bankruptcy (and may actually have filed for reorg, I forget) and Sears bought them up. The holding company bit is correct.
So in other words, the TSA is only doing the same thing your local police have been doing for years...
I have to say that while this method of selection for secondary search is still too damn intrusive, it's too early to say if it's an improvement over what they've been doing up till now (racial profiling and random searches). People complaining about a 99% failure or 1% accuracy rate have no basis to tell if that's good or not. In absolute terms it sounds terrible, but how does it compare to the success rate for the selection "criteria" they used before? If they're going from.01%, to 1%, that actually is an improvement and less intrusive than it used to be.
Calling Gray clueless because he doesn't add qualifiers like "when ground at room temperature" in a general public magazine is a false argument, because under the STP conditions that are in the normal realm of his readers' experience, his statement is true.
And your own examples are even more bogus:
The sinking of the Sheffield is sometimes blamed on a superstructure made wholly or partially from aluminium, the melting point and ignition temperature of which are significantly lower than those of steel. However, this is incorrect as the Sheffield's superstructure was made entirely of steel.[6] The confusion is related to the US and British Navies abandoning aluminium after several fires in the 1970s involving ships that had aluminium superstructures.
Yes, aluminum has a lower melting and ignition temperature than steel, but do you have any citations of disasters caused by Aluminum ignition? The cases I've found where Aluminum contributed to fire-related disasters reflect the fact that Aluminum structural features melted (about 660C) and caused structural failure, not because the metal started burning. On the other hand, Magnesium is infamous for the Apollo 1 ground fire and requires specialized equipment to extinguish:
Water should not be used to extinguish magnesium fires, because it can produce hydrogen which will feed the fire, according to the reaction:
Mg (s) + 2 H2O (g) --> Mg(OH)2 (s) + H2 (g)
or in words:
Magnesium (solid) + steam --> Magnesium hydroxide (solid) + Hydrogen (gas)
Carbon dioxide fire extinguishers should not be used either, because magnesium can burn in carbon dioxide (forming magnesium oxide, MgO, and carbon).
Not to mention that there's a big difference between metallic aluminum in a person's home and the mixture of aluminum with oxidizing and other compounds used in thermite and rocket fuel. Perhaps the fires in the Sheffield were so difficult to extinguish because of the rocket fuel, rather than aluminum aboard the ship? Saying aluminum is flammable because thermite is explosive and solid rocket fuel is hard to extinguish at least as sloppy as Gray's work, if not more-so.
the helicopter pilot and observer traced the visible-light beam (by the backscatter) back to the house of the defendants.
I thought the pilot was blinded and in pain? How can he trace it back if he can't see? I suppose they could've been stupid enough to leave it on as they pointed to other objects until his sight recovered, but that would point pretty clearly to an unintentional spotlighting of the helicopter.
Actually 2 if you count the moon. Remember the huge number of craters that exist on the far side of the moon compared with the near side? I'm not saying all of those would've struck the earth, but we'd certainly be living in a different world if even a small percentage of them had struck.
I'm getting that burning, trolling sensation, but I'll answer anyway: Don't the games on the Wii act as motion capture already? I suppose you want something you could merge into a 3-D environment of your own choosing, though.
The free market has no inherent quality that makes it more or less "correct" than anything else. It is not a natural order, it is not a universal truth or force.
Actually, the free market is a natural order. It's the law of the jungle. Right now, China's economy is probably the free-est market around in that if you bribe the right people you can pretty much sell whatever you want, at least to foreigners. Look at the results: fantastic economic growth coupled with insane amounts of pollution, poisoning and dangerous products being sold. Not to mention the speculative bubbles in the Chinese financial markets.
On the other hand, free market economics as traditionally discussed in educational and political circles is just as much of an ivory-tower concept as socialism. Where socialism falsely postulates that individuals will rationally limit their consumption in order to make production available to other members of society, free-market economics falsely postulates that all market participants share all the information they have about the market, and provide equal access to that information to all market participants. We gave up on trying to actually use this model in the U.S. in the 19th century when the government cracked down on the snake-oil salesmen and other purveyors of useless drugs.
So socialism ends up bringing government management of the economy in order to balance production, demand and distribution. In essence to make sharing rational. The free market brings government management of the economy in order to balance information about the economy.
This last might not be clear, since on the face of it, the government has tons of regulations regarding product quality, fiduciary responsibility and thousands of other economic bits. But at their core, all of these laws prevent suppliers from hiding negative information about their products and services, or buyers from hiding information about the value of their payment. So market participants have assurance that in almost all cases, products satisfy the regulatory requirements, and in most cases (or at least a sufficient percentage to achieve a deterrent effect) where products fail to satisfy the requirements they can be prosecuted. The government also regulates things like pollution, where production of a product or service damages common property. From a market perspective ensures that more of the hidden costs of producing a product are actually reflected in the price.
And of course all bureaucracies enact regulations that allow the bureaucracies to remain funded and perpetuate. In its own way, the government is a market itself, where legislators, voters, lobbyists and bureaucrats all negotiating trading prices for votes (both election and legislative), taxes, campaign funds, budget dollars, government services and other marketable items within the government economy. From this perspective, Dodd seems to pander to the voters a bit more than the lobbyists. Most of his "questionable" votes were in response to "crises" (as perceived by the public) like terrorism and the anarchy of the internet.
Well regardless of their ability to interpret our radio and tv signals, there are two factors we can't hide: 1) The signal intensity of our radio and TV is a measurable deviation from the pre-existing radio-frequency emissions of the sun. 2) For many stars in the galazy, the Earth's orbital plane aligns reasonably closely with the position of the star, so the detectable RF emissions vary periodically on a yearly basis as the Earth is occluded by the Sun from a given vantage point in space.
Before you dismiss this, remember that our own astronomers are currently detecting planets in extra-solar star systems based on some truly microscopic deviations in gravitation due to planets being occluded by their sun.
On the flip side, a lot of our RF emissions would be absorbed by interstellar gases, so a lot depends on the luck of the draw. If there happens to be a clear channel between us and an advanced alien race's home world/region, they're pretty likely to have noticed the change in the Sun's radio emissions over the past 100 years. If they've used radio in their own history, they may even be able to make an estimate of our population, although that would be full of assumptions that our technology was similar to theirs. If they assume that our radio emissions are designed to penetrate our atmosphere, they would also be able to get a general idea of the composition of our atmosphere.
I'm not particularly worried about this, though. Given the eons of galactic and geologic history, the existence of a technological society is a blip in time. So my best guess (and definitely a guess, since it's based more on deist philosophy than number crunching) is that at a given point in time, the universe averages about one intelligent, technological life-form per galaxy. That's still a lot of intelligent life out there, but you can't get there from here. Or vice versa.
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My top 10 list is more of issues to be addressed rather than specific actions to be taken: 1. Global warming and the environment. There are billions of dollars worth of real estate that are going to be underwater on the US coastline in about 50 years. The official estimates still say around 100 years, but every time I turn around, the current state of global warming is that it's happening faster than we expected. We have to stop burning fossil fuels ASAP, and possibly begin funding dikes around metropolitan areas. Mass transit also needs to be a component, once we convince people outside the northeast and Chicago that it isn't a lower-class phenomenon. 2. The poisonous atmosphere in Washington and in the political media. Not much a president can do about this other than lead by example. 3. Iraq - Needs a cold, hard, non-partisan look coupled with a dose of "if you break it, you buy it". I can't endorse the blind following of reprehensible Bush administration policies, nor can I endorse withdrawing from Iraq without restoring some level of order there. If we're lucky, the violence will settle down now that the initial blood-bath is over. But the Middle East is not a region known for letting go of old grudges. 4. The Federal budget - End the exclusion of military spending from the deficit calculations. We NEED some new taxes (or some old ones like the estate tax restored) to pay this off. I'd rather be "tax and spend" rather than "spend and go bankrupt". 5. The "war on terror" - start the process of reconciling ourselves with the international community. The neo-Con philosophy that the US can do whatever the hell it wants is completely discredited now. 6. Insurance of various types - "Insurance" has traditionally been a form of protection against statistically rare events. Health coverage doesn't really qualify as insurance now that so much of it is preventative or long-term. Natural disasters of all types should be covered in a national pool. Every region of the country has one or more types of natural disaster that is more prevalent in that area than in other parts of the country. Pooling the risks for hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, mudslides and earthquakes, sinkholes, floods and other "acts of god" on a national basis in a single program makes sense. 7. Immigration - apart from the question of how to handle the illegals, we need to boost legal immigration for two big reasons: 1) to better balance our labor costs with the global market (although no politician can say that) and avoid cross-border job losses, and 2) to get "all those damn furriners takin' our jobs" to at least be paying U.S. taxes, rather than Indian or Chinese taxes. 8. Social Security and Medicare - We need more workers (another reason to increase immigration), we need to remove the taxation cap, and we need to pay a little bit less out in retirement benefits. We need to roll Medicare into a more universal coverage system where the premiums for the healthier, younger folks help offset the costs for the elderly. 9. Corporate and Securities Law - There are several issues underlying the weirdness in the economy over the past decade. The disconnect between ownership and management of corporations has become too great. In the financial industry is it time to decouple the insurers from the brokerages and both of those from the banks again? The concentration of power in this industry is at least as dangerous to a free society as the concentration of power in the media. These guys have proven (yet again) that they can't control their greed, and it's too easy for them to bring the whole economy down. And yes, we need some new usury laws. 10. Legalize it: curtail the war on drugs to only target those drugs that cause near-term physical harm. Stuff that literally kills you or renders you incapacitated in a year or three. Stuff that's physically addictive on the order of heroin or morphine would probably qualify as illegal, but not marijuana and possibly some forms of cocaine, hallucinogens like LSD and others.
There is no way to associate the watermark with "your details" unless the retailers report back to them every purchase by every customer. And if you pay cash, then what?...or is that illegal now?
I suppose that once you've been tracked buying one item, they could fake a purchase on their own online store and then put the watermarked file out on the internet. But why would they do that? These guys have been aggressive, but it's always been about preserving their access to the revenue stream as it transitions to digital distribution. When they've sued the wrong people, it's because of their low-budget approach to evidence-gathering more than an attempt to pick members of the general public at random. Even if they're convinced you're the world's most prolific media pirate and they need to take you down, they've got a better chance of getting you on the stuff you've actually ripped and distributed, rather than some bogus paper trail that would take months to set up.
If I were being paranoid, I'd be more concerned about the watermarking scheme coupled with a rootkit to see exactly what fair-use format conversions you're doing. Or whether you're ripping disks you've borrowed from your local library. That would tempt them both from a copy-enforcement and a market-research point of view. And even if they don't uniquely identify individual disks sold to consumers, they may opt for other approaches in relation to libraries, rentals or download services.
I have to give them credit for finding a method of copy auditing that responds to the needs of both the market and their lawyers. It's early days to say whether it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, but at least they're finally breaking out of their old mindset and accepting the new distribution model.
Are you saying that if they use an encrypted, possibly steganized watermark on a lossy format like mpg or jpg, you'll be able to separate the watermark from the signal and tamper with the watermark? Yeah you can tell which bits have flipped between two versions of the recording, but if they make the watermark size large enough (say 1024 bit) so that the variations can exceed the number of copies sold by a few orders of magnitude, yet small enough so that it can be randomly scattered around the medium, how are you going to tamper with a watermark without leaving a trace? And you'd have to get digital copies of multiple versions of the media. It isn't like Wi-Fi packet sniffing where you can just download data for about 1/2 an hour and you've cracked the system. You need thousands or millions of different versions of the same song/disc to decipher any meaning from the discrepancies.
In the old days, you could say just wait a few years and the CPUs will take care of it. But it looks like we're getting near the end of Moore's law: while processor feature sizes continue to decrease, the clock rate is no longer increasing as fast, so they're forced to use multi-core and other workarounds. And given that for a CD we're talking 600-700 MB, and for DVD and HD (pick your format) we're talking 4-20 GB, it's trivial to hide a signature several kilobits long in there.
The one catch is that they have to enable a robust encryption system. If they candy-ass it like with CSS on DVDs, eventually it'll get out. On the other hand, there are more countries that have anti-circumvention laws, so even then there may not be any takers.
The prima-donna hackers (assuming they actually can walk the talk) will give you the fastest performance and churn out code quickly. But it will be code that only they can support, and in some cases only they can run it. Send them to work for an OS, game or compiler vendor.
The diversified engineers can give you things more valuable than code, like documentation, structure and conformance to requirements and standards. But their code output and the performance of their programs will be slower.
Nice try. The one thing you got right is that math, and everything else in science is a model of reality and not the actual thing itself. The same applies to creationism and religion. Religion is a model of reality, regardless of whether you are a believer or not. If you are a believer, religion is simply your (or your church leaders') best understanding of God's design and will for you and the universe. Or are you saying that believers automatically have a perfect understanding of the reality of God's will? For the believer, religion is a human model for understanding God and the universe. If you're a non-believer, god gets removed from the equation: religion is a human model for understanding the universe that has been superseded in most cases by science and the scientific method. So intelligent design gains no traction by declaring evolution as a "model". Intelligent design itself is a model, and should be evaluated by comparing the two models scientifically, not politically.
Evolution isn't just educated guesses about the past. There's the fossil record, there is the observation in the present day of mutation and natural selection in species ranging from bacteria to human. Bacteria are mutating and being selected for immunity to antibiotics. Human genes are still mutating at a rate comparable to that of other primates. And the measured rate of mutation in various species indicates species divergence that matches the fosssil record. In other words, we are finding common ancestor species in the fossil time frame where genomic theory predicts they should be.
The creationists continue to mis-use scientific terminology to cloud the issue in the public mind. For all practical purposes, a "theory" in science IS a fact. A theory represents the best available explanation of a natural process or phenomenon, and for elementary school students and the general public it might as well be a fact. Gravity, the laws of thermodynamics and mass-energy conversion are theories, and evolution stands as a peer to those based on over a century of scientific study and measurement. The disproving of scientific theories is always possible, but it's an activity best left to people experienced in the use of the scientific method, not by clouding the minds of primary and secondary school students.
What the creationists have isn't a theory, and to give it scientific equivalence to the theory of evolution in our primary and secondary schools is a farce. While some studies of creationism and intelligent design have been conducted, the results don't provide enough (or even any) evidence to raise creationism or intelligent design to the level of a theory. In scientific terminology, intelligent design is at best a hypothesis: an educated guess that needs to be tested and evaluated further.
The difficulty is that intelligent design and creationism have not yielded any statements that can be verified by experiment. This isn't saying that the experiments have failed, it's saying no one has been able to design an experiment yet to adequately prove it one way or the other in areas where it contradicts the theory of evolution. The main tenet of intelligent design is that plain old evolution by random mutation and natural selection can't be true because it the rate of evolution from primit
Thanks. About all I know about orbital mechanics I learned from "The Integral Trees":
"Out to go back,
back to go in,
in to go forward,
forward to go out."
That's another good point, although once you get to compiler design, you better know already how to manage pointers and references. But for the pure software folks, developing a simple compiler might be preferable to a microprocessor oriented course.
Well, if the students were drinking as an act of civil disobedience, maybe I could go along with the problem being the system. But the school is involved because the students are in clubs and athletic teams that have rules about underage drinking, distinct from general school rules or the public laws against it. The rules that resulted in their suspensions were not in force only by virtue of them being underage, the students voluntarily signed up for activities that demanded that they abide by those rules. Life is full of choices, and sometimes none of the options are palatable. "Let's see, do I confront my wretched adolescent life head-on and endure the pain, or do I anesthetize my self with some medicinal beer." at one end of the spectrum, and "Let's see, do I like Lacrosse enough to give up drinking?" at the other end of the spectrum.
Yeah kids are stupid. That's why the rules are there in the first place, to bring their stupidity to their attention before it has a more lasting effect in the real world. Some levels of stupidity in the real world can get you the death penalty, enforced either by the state or by the semi that hits you as you run the red light. There may be some nits to pick among the details of the case (for example, game suspensions for drinking that occurred prior to joining the team?), but the general process here is sound.
Move along, there's nothing to see here. Some kids went out drinking and their doofus friend posted pictures of it, and they got busted. It happens all the time, and it's not a cause celebre.
Apart from sanitizing their input, why aren't they sanitizing their permissions? If a web app only has access to a database via stored procedures, they can't even look at the table except through the stored procs. So your read-only data stays read-only. You'd still be vulnerable in user-submitted content for which your procedure is designed to allow updates to string or text data on a particular table, but even there the procedure can limit scope by (for example) only allowing updates to records belonging to the user ID. And for some applications, this requires a DBMS that allows large objects to be passed to a procedure, which isn't guaranteed.
I have this TV from the 1970's that has a tremendous curve on it. So what if it's convex instead of concave?
Obviously UANAL. I'm not either, but this isn't the FBI/DOJ searching, this is the Customs service (part of the treasury department). They are pretty much allowed to do everything short of a body-cavity search with no probable cause. And probable cause can be "he was acting nervous and his answers sounded suspicious".
The primary purpose is to search for any kind of contraband, not just stuff that's completely banned. Apart from terrorist documents, this can include undeclared items on which duty is owed, pr0n that offends the community standards (of which the kiddies would be a sub-set), agricultural products that may be infested with vermin, items pirated or counterfeited (that Gucci handbag you picked up at the flea market in Paris, as well as the DVDs from Shanghai) and weapons. The original intent of this was to ensure that the government got its cut, but the scope was expanded when items like drugs and weapons started to get banned in the US.
From the court's perspective, opening a computer's HD is analogous to opening a chest full of documents, photos and videos and viewing every one. The level of privacy invaded by scanning a HD is no greater than opening and viewing a collection of love-letters, and they were already allowed to do that. Don't get your hopes up this will be overturned.
Is it the magnitude of the delta-v that causes it to be able to be treated as a scalar, or the fact that the delta-v is typically applied directly along the vector of velocity? (i.e. the rockets are oriented in parallel with the velocity vector before firing)
If I recall correctly, introductory programming classes are geared toward the mass of the student body and not really relevant to systems programming. And NONE of the languages traditionally taught in introductory programming (FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal, Java) use pointers the way they are used in C, C++ and Assembler. So the argument at that level is really moot.
The real question is: what is the first programming language that a computer science or engineering major should learn AFTER intro programming? While C could be considered "obsolete", I would still prefer it to C++ in this case, because C++ would give Java programmers a false sense of familiarity due to its object orientation. But even C introduces several permutations and uses of pointers that can be confusing. Pointers to arrays of function pointers, anyone?
Frankly, I'd prefer to see the CS and CSwEng majors get into a course on boolean logic and logical microprocessor architecture, with a simple assembly language like 6502 8-bit assembler used as the programming tool. It's easier to learn about pointers as indirect memory references when you only have to worry about the memory management involved in adding two arbitrary integers, and not have to worry about refactoring your objects and other complexities introduced by the higher level languages. Learning some simple assembler and architectural concepts would also help the comprehension of what is going on in C and C++ behind the scenes. For example, the short-hand notations for incrementing and decrementing numbers in C/C++ make more sense after seeing the corresponding assembler operations.
This whole thing sounds like it's in response to the irresponsible investigative techniques used by the RIAA, and the counterclaims filed by one of the defendants. I would've thought that /.ers would be jumping on this bandwagon right quick.
Nice concept for portability and low energy, but it needs to be updated to modern video resolutions. One year from now, just about everyone in their target market will have an HD flat panel (or multiple) and the output of this thing will look like crap by comparison. On the other hand, that's what they said about the Wii...a year ago.
Seriously, though. If you want to share video in a public place like a bus or a mall, you aren't going to project it on a surface anyone can see it on. You'd probably get arrested for not having a permit or sued for a copyright-infringing public presentation.
And if you want to do a projection in a slightly less public venue (say a friend's family room or a client's conference room), you'd expect better resolution. The product is too gadget-ty to attract the low-tech end of the mainstream and too low-res to attract the high-tech end. Maybe a market for a year or so until analog TV gets canned, then a narrowing market segment as DVD players phase out for HD (pick your format) and it becomes the lowest-res thing on the market.
If it was just Slashdotters that were no longer buying CDs, the RIAA wouldn't be so panicked. It's all the college students that can install a BitTorrent (or whatever) client and download music. It's all the people that buy music downloads from non-RIAA artists. It's even the legal download services that legally sell RIAA music, because the RIAA mindset still hasn't fully adopted that market strategy (hence DRM).
Actually, the other way around. K-Mart was going into bankruptcy (and may actually have filed for reorg, I forget) and Sears bought them up. The holding company bit is correct.
So in other words, the TSA is only doing the same thing your local police have been doing for years...
.01%, to 1%, that actually is an improvement and less intrusive than it used to be.
I have to say that while this method of selection for secondary search is still too damn intrusive, it's too early to say if it's an improvement over what they've been doing up till now (racial profiling and random searches). People complaining about a 99% failure or 1% accuracy rate have no basis to tell if that's good or not. In absolute terms it sounds terrible, but how does it compare to the success rate for the selection "criteria" they used before? If they're going from
And your own examples are even more bogus:
The sinking of the Sheffield is sometimes blamed on a superstructure made wholly or partially from aluminium, the melting point and ignition temperature of which are significantly lower than those of steel. However, this is incorrect as the Sheffield's superstructure was made entirely of steel.[6] The confusion is related to the US and British Navies abandoning aluminium after several fires in the 1970s involving ships that had aluminium superstructures.
Yes, aluminum has a lower melting and ignition temperature than steel, but do you have any citations of disasters caused by Aluminum ignition? The cases I've found where Aluminum contributed to fire-related disasters reflect the fact that Aluminum structural features melted (about 660C) and caused structural failure, not because the metal started burning. On the other hand, Magnesium is infamous for the Apollo 1 ground fire and requires specialized equipment to extinguish:
Water should not be used to extinguish magnesium fires, because it can produce hydrogen which will feed the fire, according to the reaction: Mg (s) + 2 H2O (g) --> Mg(OH)2 (s) + H2 (g) or in words: Magnesium (solid) + steam --> Magnesium hydroxide (solid) + Hydrogen (gas) Carbon dioxide fire extinguishers should not be used either, because magnesium can burn in carbon dioxide (forming magnesium oxide, MgO, and carbon).
Not to mention that there's a big difference between metallic aluminum in a person's home and the mixture of aluminum with oxidizing and other compounds used in thermite and rocket fuel. Perhaps the fires in the Sheffield were so difficult to extinguish because of the rocket fuel, rather than aluminum aboard the ship? Saying aluminum is flammable because thermite is explosive and solid rocket fuel is hard to extinguish at least as sloppy as Gray's work, if not more-so.
So it would be a dt/dt^2.
the helicopter pilot and observer traced the visible-light beam (by the backscatter) back to the house of the defendants.
I thought the pilot was blinded and in pain? How can he trace it back if he can't see? I suppose they could've been stupid enough to leave it on as they pointed to other objects until his sight recovered, but that would point pretty clearly to an unintentional spotlighting of the helicopter.
Actually 2 if you count the moon. Remember the huge number of craters that exist on the far side of the moon compared with the near side? I'm not saying all of those would've struck the earth, but we'd certainly be living in a different world if even a small percentage of them had struck.
I'm getting that burning, trolling sensation, but I'll answer anyway: Don't the games on the Wii act as motion capture already? I suppose you want something you could merge into a 3-D environment of your own choosing, though.
The free market has no inherent quality that makes it more or less "correct" than anything else. It is not a natural order, it is not a universal truth or force.
Actually, the free market is a natural order. It's the law of the jungle. Right now, China's economy is probably the free-est market around in that if you bribe the right people you can pretty much sell whatever you want, at least to foreigners. Look at the results: fantastic economic growth coupled with insane amounts of pollution, poisoning and dangerous products being sold. Not to mention the speculative bubbles in the Chinese financial markets.
On the other hand, free market economics as traditionally discussed in educational and political circles is just as much of an ivory-tower concept as socialism. Where socialism falsely postulates that individuals will rationally limit their consumption in order to make production available to other members of society, free-market economics falsely postulates that all market participants share all the information they have about the market, and provide equal access to that information to all market participants. We gave up on trying to actually use this model in the U.S. in the 19th century when the government cracked down on the snake-oil salesmen and other purveyors of useless drugs.
So socialism ends up bringing government management of the economy in order to balance production, demand and distribution. In essence to make sharing rational. The free market brings government management of the economy in order to balance information about the economy.
This last might not be clear, since on the face of it, the government has tons of regulations regarding product quality, fiduciary responsibility and thousands of other economic bits. But at their core, all of these laws prevent suppliers from hiding negative information about their products and services, or buyers from hiding information about the value of their payment. So market participants have assurance that in almost all cases, products satisfy the regulatory requirements, and in most cases (or at least a sufficient percentage to achieve a deterrent effect) where products fail to satisfy the requirements they can be prosecuted. The government also regulates things like pollution, where production of a product or service damages common property. From a market perspective ensures that more of the hidden costs of producing a product are actually reflected in the price.
And of course all bureaucracies enact regulations that allow the bureaucracies to remain funded and perpetuate. In its own way, the government is a market itself, where legislators, voters, lobbyists and bureaucrats all negotiating trading prices for votes (both election and legislative), taxes, campaign funds, budget dollars, government services and other marketable items within the government economy. From this perspective, Dodd seems to pander to the voters a bit more than the lobbyists. Most of his "questionable" votes were in response to "crises" (as perceived by the public) like terrorism and the anarchy of the internet.
Well regardless of their ability to interpret our radio and tv signals, there are two factors we can't hide:
1) The signal intensity of our radio and TV is a measurable deviation from the pre-existing radio-frequency emissions of the sun.
2) For many stars in the galazy, the Earth's orbital plane aligns reasonably closely with the position of the star, so the detectable RF emissions vary periodically on a yearly basis as the Earth is occluded by the Sun from a given vantage point in space.
Before you dismiss this, remember that our own astronomers are currently detecting planets in extra-solar star systems based on some truly microscopic deviations in gravitation due to planets being occluded by their sun.
On the flip side, a lot of our RF emissions would be absorbed by interstellar gases, so a lot depends on the luck of the draw. If there happens to be a clear channel between us and an advanced alien race's home world/region, they're pretty likely to have noticed the change in the Sun's radio emissions over the past 100 years. If they've used radio in their own history, they may even be able to make an estimate of our population, although that would be full of assumptions that our technology was similar to theirs. If they assume that our radio emissions are designed to penetrate our atmosphere, they would also be able to get a general idea of the composition of our atmosphere.
I'm not particularly worried about this, though. Given the eons of galactic and geologic history, the existence of a technological society is a blip in time. So my best guess (and definitely a guess, since it's based more on deist philosophy than number crunching) is that at a given point in time, the universe averages about one intelligent, technological life-form per galaxy. That's still a lot of intelligent life out there, but you can't get there from here. Or vice versa.