The baby boomers were protesting Vietnam and fomenting the sexual revolution in the 60's and 70's (without which there would've been no Penthouse (or Club, for that matter) available to you in the 1980s), and look at what they're up to now. They coined the phrase "Never trust anyone over 30." and now that they're over 30 (50 more like), they're proving the point from the opposite side as well. Look at the last 2 liars we elected as presidents.
There is no zealot like a convert. In 20 years, anyone from the internet generation who ends up feeling disgusted by their own earlier behavior is probably going to become a gay wedding bomber or something like that.
Anyway, there only guarantee for the future is that there are no guarantees. At least using current technology.
There's also a distinction (or there should be) between intercepting WiFi connections when on someone else's property (e.g., the Lowe's case) vs. intercepting WiFi connections from public property (war-driving) vs. intercepting Wi-Fi from your own property.
Part of the original rationale of requiring the FCC to act in the public interest was the invasion of our homes by radio waves, first AM, then TV and FM and now all the other stuff we get radiated with. If someone else's WiFi reaches into my home, it should be fair game, especially if it interferes with my reception of my own network.
Public property is more ambiguous (especially if there is other truly public access available from the same site: "Sorry, I thought it was the City Network!").
Frankly, I think this guy should fall back on the CB radio defense: he was on public property exchanging transmissions with an unlicensed radio source.
Context also needs to be taken into account. For example, if you buy a 30 dollar sound card it costs 30 dollars. So be sure you're talking about a true plural and not an adjective phrase.
Are you saying that the owner of the main web site actually claims title to a certain area of your screen when you browse to their site? I think a better analogy would be a mail order catalog that displays products from one company in full color in the front, and buries other stuff in small print in the back. You may have ordered the catalog in order to get at the stuff they bury in the back, but the other company is paying the catalog co for prime location.
This case didn't address the issue from the user's perspective of whether the adware was installed with the user's consent, it just addressed the issue of whether the primary websites were being hijacked.
and the other advertisers isn't the ads. It's the $#@! tracking cookies.
In general, internet ads aren't really any more intrusive than TV and Radio ads, so there will probably be a large enough audience willing to put up with the ads to support the "free" content model. There are always a few website operators that think they are maximizing their revenue by serving up 14 background popup windows, but these don't tend to last very long. I'm not going to put up with some advertiser tracking every web site I visit, though. Let the content providers do their own audience research (or contract it to a neutral party) and provide the results to the advertisers. At least if they use tracking cookies, they have a positive motivation (risk of losing customers) to anonymize the information they've collected. The current situation is as if AC Neilsen (in the US) was the media broker as well as the audience surveyor for TV and radio audiences.
As a side note, when it's costing me nearly $50/month to connect to the internet, I can't exactly call this "free" content, either.
...unless it actually starts costing them money or jail time. They only pulled the plug because their advertisers started pulling the plug. Until this got notices, they were laissez-faire to the point of stupidity. Now they come down all "violation of terms of service", "have to comply with our advertisers' contracts". They're just another media conglomerate that will use as much sex as they can get away with to sell ad space. They just need to redefine what they can "get away with".
Since a significant SF work has used FTL travel as a significant plot point. The most recent examples I can think of are James P. Hogan's works where the plot concerned the development of FTL or unlimited supplies of energy or time travel.
You could argue that David Brin's Uplift series also make use of FTL as a plot device (notably Startide Rising), but the central theme of those works is ecology and the relationship between species. Like Brin's, many newer SF societies pre-suppose FTL travel or communication, but nowadays the theme and plot of those stories is completely unrelated to FTL and its consequences.
Serious SF has already thoroughly examined the direct consequences of FTL travel and has moved into speculating on the nature of societies that have FTL available.
The classic definition of hard SF used to be to make one assumption that is not accepted by current scientific theory, or is distinct from current society and examine the consequences of that change. This could be anything from the existence of FTL to the south winning the US Civil War to the world being a flat disc on the backs of 4 elephants riding on the back of a giant turtle (once again Terry Pratchett pushes the envelope until it rips).
On the other hand the central premise of the article is correct. Apart from the fact that 90% of SF is crap, just like it was in the 1950's and '60s, modern SF books don't put the science at the center of the story. This doesn't make the SF any worse as LITERATURE. Lois McMaster Bujold, Terry Pratchett and other top SF and fantasy authors write more complete and well-rounded NOVELS than just about any SF from the "golden age". But science is no longer the theme.
Don't blame the authors or the publishers though. This just reflects society's attitude toward scientists now (intellectual elitists trying to usurp God) vs. our attitude in the 50's (intellectual heroes able to usurp God, given enough time). Neither view is reasonable, but the literature comes from the society.
To successfully terraform, OR to create a space settlement you need to establish a self-sustaining ecosystem. Well, theoretically you could support a colony with massive (literally) transfers of resources from Earth, but that would increase the costs of a colonization project at least 10 fold.
The only attempt that's been made to establish a self-sustaining ecology is the well-known Biodome project, which should've been promoted as an engineering prototype project, rather than being slurred as a badly-designed research project. In an engineering project, the objective would be to get the thing to work, while as a research project they didn't have sufficient experimental controls.
If we can't maintain a closed eco-system here on earth, it will take decades or centuries before we could do it in space or on the surface of another planet. To attempt space colonization before that would be suicidal.
Another plus of investigating the ecological aspects of space colonization first is that it will be easier to get buy-in from the Earth-first crowd, since such research can be used to develop techniques to terraform, optimize or restore Earth's environment.
You're assuming that the descent would occur over the US. For transatlantic that would probably be true, but for great circle between Asia and US East coast, the descent could be done over northern Canada (assuming the Canadians didn't object).
In the US, radio stations pay royalties for the music they play. It's a structure similar to what the feds enacted for web radio stations a few years ago: a flat rate per song.
Of course the record companies pay a lot back to the media brokers and radio station in the typical "pay for play" scheme, so for many stations it's not an issue.
You mean a competitive advantage like they don't have now?
I can see where the little guy will have a disadvantage, but no more so than before. There is enough competition amongst the big guys themselves that they will be challenging each other's patents, too. I like the idea of the general public being able to fill in research that the USPTO missed and file challenges to a patent without having to wait to be sued by the patent holder. Coupled with the "open source legal research" concept behind Groklaw, it can be a powerful tool for the little guy. Eventually, the process for this will probably become as bureaucratic and expensive as the rest of the patent process, but for now it's a step in the right direction.
A suggested rule: If students weren't allowed to use slide rules for a task in the "good old days", they shouldn't need a calculator to do the same task in modern times.
So basically eliminate calculators from grade school. They'll be needed in middle school (more or less) once students start getting introduced to logs and trig. They certainly aren't needed to teach conversion of decimals to fractions and vice versa. The concept can be tested pretty simply with a 2 digit repeating decimal. Seems like some schools think it's more important to have 30 or 40 problems on a math test with variations on the same theme, than to have 10 or 15 problems on a test that allow the students enough time to do the problems by hand (given reasonable values).
One possible exception we should consider: people with learning disabilities. It's probably more important to teach them to use the tools to overcome their disability than to try to force the knowledge in cases where it just isn't going to happen. Other disabilities can hide the fact that the student actually knows the concepts, but their disability affects their ability to express their knowledge.
And if someone breaks into your house, they'll just steal everything and hit the magic reset button on the router anyway. So unless you have a teenager who likes to hack your network for purposes you disapprove of, there's minimal risk. It's probably safer to keep the password in a file cabinet than it is to keep it in a password-minder on the computer.
In a corporate setting, though...completely different story.
Well, if the Keyhole satellites were still owned by the feds you would be right but for the wrong reasons. Photographs have long been recognized as copyrightable, despite the fact that there is no "author". Works from the government are not copyrightable.
But the satellites are now under the control of a Google subsidiary, so the photos taken by the satellites are owned by Google.
The satellite is just a big automated camera under the control of technicians (read "photographers") at an earth ground station. Unless Google's lawyers have slipped up, those employees have signed away their rights to any of the pictures they take.
It isn't just using the proper tool for the job, switching between the two can kill your productivity faster than anything. If your fingers are already on the keyboard, Alt-F, O is faster than switching to the mouse and clicking file_>open - even if you have one of those laptop eraser-head. Same thing with copy & paste operations.
Or another example, if you're already in Windows explorer it probably makes more sense to drag & drop files with the mouse, whereas if you're in a cmd session, it probably makes more sense to type: copy *.* dest as long as the paths weren't too far off.
That's probably not such a substantial amount of rock when compared with the total volume of Mars crust. But how much of Mars' crust actually shows signs of being derived from serpentinized rock? For this amount of methane to exist, it implies that the serpentinization has already taken place. Obviously, given our limited sample set, the answer is "we don't know".
I also wonder how much water it would take to serpentinize that much olivine. (Any geologists/chemists?). Is it only a catalyst or does the water get absorbed or converted by the rock as part of the process?
Isn't it possible to assign/delegate copyright enforcement rights without actually assigning copyright? As I recall, that's what Novell is claiming their deal was with SCO. SCO got the right to distribute Unix and sue on the behalf of Novell, but Novell claims it retained the actual copyright.
A GPL version of this could be added to the new GPL, so that the author of a derivative work and the original copyright holder automatically cross-license the right to sue on each other's behalf.
Remember that XML patent MS received for linking objects in an XML document? I bet the XML format is designed so that patent covers everything from font files to page formats in their new XML format. So if you want to be able to use MS file formats, you'll have to pay a hefty patent licensing fee.
That was bought and paid for in the 1970s. The only thing that needs funding now is the ground monitoring. Voyager will continue on regardless of whether we pay someone to hear it.
Maybe the Chinese can invest some of their dollar denominated debt in their space program. Despite all the lip service, I don't expect the Repubicans to fund major satellite exploration.
While your categories are reasonable, you've left out whole classes of systems (for example communications-related software, and OO/RDBMS) which can range between Business and Technical programming because of performance constraints (perform multiple lookups against a 10-100 GB database within 100 ms per lookup, with volumes of millions of queries per minute), and new business processes spawned by competition (think Walmart). New processes generate demand for new applications like data mining that are enabled by new advances in hardware and algorithms. So it's naive to say that "the underlying programming problems were all solved 40 years ago". The theory may have been worked out, but actual implementation depends as much on local system requirements and constraints as the existence of a well-defined algorithm.
Also, even if 90% of developers on a Business programming team have no CS or engineering experience, you need at least a few people with a software engineering background to avoid the stupid mistakes that run-of-the-mill programmers just don't think of. In other words, to make people aware of the underlying programming problems that actually were solved 40 years ago. A couple of examples: 1) so that people understand what the hell change control is, and why its needed. And 2) understanding why this nifty Java program that was written for a small workgroup didn't scale when it was ported to a corporate Linux server and 10,000 users were added.
Of course all this is irrelevant anyway. We don't need any CS or SW engineering majors in the US because hardly any new IT jobs are going to be created in the US for the next 15 years or more. Either that or they will be at $15,000/year.
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The baby boomers were protesting Vietnam and fomenting the sexual revolution in the 60's and 70's (without which there would've been no Penthouse (or Club, for that matter) available to you in the 1980s), and look at what they're up to now. They coined the phrase "Never trust anyone over 30." and now that they're over 30 (50 more like), they're proving the point from the opposite side as well. Look at the last 2 liars we elected as presidents.
There is no zealot like a convert. In 20 years, anyone from the internet generation who ends up feeling disgusted by their own earlier behavior is probably going to become a gay wedding bomber or something like that.
Anyway, there only guarantee for the future is that there are no guarantees. At least using current technology.
There's also a distinction (or there should be) between intercepting WiFi connections when on someone else's property (e.g., the Lowe's case) vs. intercepting WiFi connections from public property (war-driving) vs. intercepting Wi-Fi from your own property.
Part of the original rationale of requiring the FCC to act in the public interest was the invasion of our homes by radio waves, first AM, then TV and FM and now all the other stuff we get radiated with. If someone else's WiFi reaches into my home, it should be fair game, especially if it interferes with my reception of my own network.
Public property is more ambiguous (especially if there is other truly public access available from the same site: "Sorry, I thought it was the City Network!").
Frankly, I think this guy should fall back on the CB radio defense: he was on public property exchanging transmissions with an unlicensed radio source.
Context also needs to be taken into account. For example, if you buy a 30 dollar sound card it costs 30 dollars. So be sure you're talking about a true plural and not an adjective phrase.
Are you saying that the owner of the main web site actually claims title to a certain area of your screen when you browse to their site? I think a better analogy would be a mail order catalog that displays products from one company in full color in the front, and buries other stuff in small print in the back. You may have ordered the catalog in order to get at the stuff they bury in the back, but the other company is paying the catalog co for prime location.
This case didn't address the issue from the user's perspective of whether the adware was installed with the user's consent, it just addressed the issue of whether the primary websites were being hijacked.
and the other advertisers isn't the ads. It's the $#@! tracking cookies.
In general, internet ads aren't really any more intrusive than TV and Radio ads, so there will probably be a large enough audience willing to put up with the ads to support the "free" content model. There are always a few website operators that think they are maximizing their revenue by serving up 14 background popup windows, but these don't tend to last very long. I'm not going to put up with some advertiser tracking every web site I visit, though. Let the content providers do their own audience research (or contract it to a neutral party) and provide the results to the advertisers. At least if they use tracking cookies, they have a positive motivation (risk of losing customers) to anonymize the information they've collected. The current situation is as if AC Neilsen (in the US) was the media broker as well as the audience surveyor for TV and radio audiences.
As a side note, when it's costing me nearly $50/month to connect to the internet, I can't exactly call this "free" content, either.
...unless it actually starts costing them money or jail time. They only pulled the plug because their advertisers started pulling the plug. Until this got notices, they were laissez-faire to the point of stupidity. Now they come down all "violation of terms of service", "have to comply with our advertisers' contracts". They're just another media conglomerate that will use as much sex as they can get away with to sell ad space. They just need to redefine what they can "get away with".
Since a significant SF work has used FTL travel as a significant plot point. The most recent examples I can think of are James P. Hogan's works where the plot concerned the development of FTL or unlimited supplies of energy or time travel.
You could argue that David Brin's Uplift series also make use of FTL as a plot device (notably Startide Rising), but the central theme of those works is ecology and the relationship between species. Like Brin's, many newer SF societies pre-suppose FTL travel or communication, but nowadays the theme and plot of those stories is completely unrelated to FTL and its consequences.
Serious SF has already thoroughly examined the direct consequences of FTL travel and has moved into speculating on the nature of societies that have FTL available.
The classic definition of hard SF used to be to make one assumption that is not accepted by current scientific theory, or is distinct from current society and examine the consequences of that change. This could be anything from the existence of FTL to the south winning the US Civil War to the world being a flat disc on the backs of 4 elephants riding on the back of a giant turtle (once again Terry Pratchett pushes the envelope until it rips).
On the other hand the central premise of the article is correct. Apart from the fact that 90% of SF is crap, just like it was in the 1950's and '60s, modern SF books don't put the science at the center of the story. This doesn't make the SF any worse as LITERATURE. Lois McMaster Bujold, Terry Pratchett and other top SF and fantasy authors write more complete and well-rounded NOVELS than just about any SF from the "golden age". But science is no longer the theme.
Don't blame the authors or the publishers though. This just reflects society's attitude toward scientists now (intellectual elitists trying to usurp God) vs. our attitude in the 50's (intellectual heroes able to usurp God, given enough time). Neither view is reasonable, but the literature comes from the society.
To successfully terraform, OR to create a space settlement you need to establish a self-sustaining ecosystem. Well, theoretically you could support a colony with massive (literally) transfers of resources from Earth, but that would increase the costs of a colonization project at least 10 fold.
The only attempt that's been made to establish a self-sustaining ecology is the well-known Biodome project, which should've been promoted as an engineering prototype project, rather than being slurred as a badly-designed research project. In an engineering project, the objective would be to get the thing to work, while as a research project they didn't have sufficient experimental controls.
If we can't maintain a closed eco-system here on earth, it will take decades or centuries before we could do it in space or on the surface of another planet. To attempt space colonization before that would be suicidal.
Another plus of investigating the ecological aspects of space colonization first is that it will be easier to get buy-in from the Earth-first crowd, since such research can be used to develop techniques to terraform, optimize or restore Earth's environment.
Thank you, Kim Stanley Robinson.
But that's who they're marketing the product to in the first place. So they only have to copy protect it against their target market.
You're assuming that the descent would occur over the US. For transatlantic that would probably be true, but for great circle between Asia and US East coast, the descent could be done over northern Canada (assuming the Canadians didn't object).
or Microsoft Scripting Host? Remember the last time MS tried to introduce a new scripting environment?
If I was a hacker, I'd be rubbing my keyboard in glee.
In the US, radio stations pay royalties for the music they play. It's a structure similar to what the feds enacted for web radio stations a few years ago: a flat rate per song.
Of course the record companies pay a lot back to the media brokers and radio station in the typical "pay for play" scheme, so for many stations it's not an issue.
You mean a competitive advantage like they don't have now?
I can see where the little guy will have a disadvantage, but no more so than before. There is enough competition amongst the big guys themselves that they will be challenging each other's patents, too. I like the idea of the general public being able to fill in research that the USPTO missed and file challenges to a patent without having to wait to be sued by the patent holder. Coupled with the "open source legal research" concept behind Groklaw, it can be a powerful tool for the little guy. Eventually, the process for this will probably become as bureaucratic and expensive as the rest of the patent process, but for now it's a step in the right direction.
A suggested rule: If students weren't allowed to use slide rules for a task in the "good old days", they shouldn't need a calculator to do the same task in modern times.
So basically eliminate calculators from grade school. They'll be needed in middle school (more or less) once students start getting introduced to logs and trig. They certainly aren't needed to teach conversion of decimals to fractions and vice versa. The concept can be tested pretty simply with a 2 digit repeating decimal. Seems like some schools think it's more important to have 30 or 40 problems on a math test with variations on the same theme, than to have 10 or 15 problems on a test that allow the students enough time to do the problems by hand (given reasonable values).
One possible exception we should consider: people with learning disabilities. It's probably more important to teach them to use the tools to overcome their disability than to try to force the knowledge in cases where it just isn't going to happen. Other disabilities can hide the fact that the student actually knows the concepts, but their disability affects their ability to express their knowledge.
And if someone breaks into your house, they'll just steal everything and hit the magic reset button on the router anyway. So unless you have a teenager who likes to hack your network for purposes you disapprove of, there's minimal risk. It's probably safer to keep the password in a file cabinet than it is to keep it in a password-minder on the computer.
In a corporate setting, though...completely different story.
Well, if the Keyhole satellites were still owned by the feds you would be right but for the wrong reasons. Photographs have long been recognized as copyrightable, despite the fact that there is no "author". Works from the government are not copyrightable.
But the satellites are now under the control of a Google subsidiary, so the photos taken by the satellites are owned by Google.
The satellite is just a big automated camera under the control of technicians (read "photographers") at an earth ground station. Unless Google's lawyers have slipped up, those employees have signed away their rights to any of the pictures they take.
It isn't just using the proper tool for the job, switching between the two can kill your productivity faster than anything. If your fingers are already on the keyboard, Alt-F, O is faster than switching to the mouse and clicking file_>open - even if you have one of those laptop eraser-head. Same thing with copy & paste operations.
Or another example, if you're already in Windows explorer it probably makes more sense to drag & drop files with the mouse, whereas if you're in a cmd session, it probably makes more sense to type: copy *.* dest as long as the paths weren't too far off.
That's probably not such a substantial amount of rock when compared with the total volume of Mars crust. But how much of Mars' crust actually shows signs of being derived from serpentinized rock? For this amount of methane to exist, it implies that the serpentinization has already taken place. Obviously, given our limited sample set, the answer is "we don't know".
I also wonder how much water it would take to serpentinize that much olivine. (Any geologists/chemists?). Is it only a catalyst or does the water get absorbed or converted by the rock as part of the process?
Their largest contributor base (corporations) will want this stuff, and the largest voting base (relgious conservatives) will hate the stuff.
Isn't it possible to assign/delegate copyright enforcement rights without actually assigning copyright? As I recall, that's what Novell is claiming their deal was with SCO. SCO got the right to distribute Unix and sue on the behalf of Novell, but Novell claims it retained the actual copyright.
A GPL version of this could be added to the new GPL, so that the author of a derivative work and the original copyright holder automatically cross-license the right to sue on each other's behalf.
Remember that XML patent MS received for linking objects in an XML document? I bet the XML format is designed so that patent covers everything from font files to page formats in their new XML format. So if you want to be able to use MS file formats, you'll have to pay a hefty patent licensing fee.
That was bought and paid for in the 1970s. The only thing that needs funding now is the ground monitoring. Voyager will continue on regardless of whether we pay someone to hear it.
Maybe the Chinese can invest some of their dollar denominated debt in their space program. Despite all the lip service, I don't expect the Repubicans to fund major satellite exploration.
While your categories are reasonable, you've left out whole classes of systems (for example communications-related software, and OO/RDBMS) which can range between Business and Technical programming because of performance constraints (perform multiple lookups against a 10-100 GB database within 100 ms per lookup, with volumes of millions of queries per minute), and new business processes spawned by competition (think Walmart). New processes generate demand for new applications like data mining that are enabled by new advances in hardware and algorithms. So it's naive to say that "the underlying programming problems were all solved 40 years ago". The theory may have been worked out, but actual implementation depends as much on local system requirements and constraints as the existence of a well-defined algorithm.
Also, even if 90% of developers on a Business programming team have no CS or engineering experience, you need at least a few people with a software engineering background to avoid the stupid mistakes that run-of-the-mill programmers just don't think of. In other words, to make people aware of the underlying programming problems that actually were solved 40 years ago. A couple of examples: 1) so that people understand what the hell change control is, and why its needed. And 2) understanding why this nifty Java program that was written for a small workgroup didn't scale when it was ported to a corporate Linux server and 10,000 users were added.
Of course all this is irrelevant anyway. We don't need any CS or SW engineering majors in the US because hardly any new IT jobs are going to be created in the US for the next 15 years or more. Either that or they will be at $15,000/year.
Yeah, but switching to open source software sure would prevent his department from being audited to death.