Might be great, or useless
on
Airborne Mouse
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Depends a lot on how well it is implemented. Implied in the write-up is that it might be hard to hold the pointer position while you click buttons, and they have an 'enable' trigger so you can freeze the position before clicking. Sounds like that might be cumbersome.
Better would be to start re-thinking some things more fundamentally. As you suggest, there are new degrees of freedom that could be used to enhance the interface for 3D control. The idea of 'gestures' could be very useful too, but you have to maintain compatibility both with people's familiarity with using mice, and the system and application support for mice.
I think it would be cooler if one of these could be strapped to your hand or wrist so you could still type on the keyboard without putting it down, and also access pointer functions more or less seemlessly. This needs some real hard core UI research and experimentation.
It wasn't an attack, it was a bug. In brief, there was part of the initialization code that wasn't properly multithreaded, and it caused cascading failures. It wasn't a problem as long as only one switch in a 'neighborhood' was re-initializing, but once it got started, more switches connected to the original set would hit the same problem and re-initialize too and things just kept getting worse.
The nature of the problem was that all the switches were running the same or very close versions of the software, and they all had the same bug. It's a good thing MS isn't making much headway in the server, firewall and router spaces, or we would have lots of problems like this one already. (ok, it's a lame joke really, but not too hard to imagine a real scenario)
How much stuff could you have? Throw some out, maybe do a little sorting while you are weeding out. If you aspire to be like Martha Stewart, then organize stuff into storage bins that are well organized and labeled.
When the move date looms and you haven't done any of the above yet, make sure you have lots of extra boxes (plastic bags for clothes and that wrapping film are really useful) and just start packing and throwing. Some organization is good, and make sure you are careful about the things you really need to use in the near future (one theory is everything else should be pitched). Except for those small number of important boxes, your not going to unpack the rest for a year or more anyway.
We've been in our house (first one) for almost a year and a half, and I'm almost done with moving box archeology (it can be fun sometimes). Except for the dozen or so boxes recently moved from the garage to the basement to make room to store a sister's pop-up trailer. Then there's the stuff from another sister who's off at graduate school, and the other sister currently semi long term consulting out of town who is going to drop her appartment here and put more boxes in the basement. Theoretically, owning a house is a longer term proposition than renting, so I don't mind accumulating stuff, but I try to keep a little control over it. When I was younger I moved between the East Coast and Chicago several times, mostly in very overpacked cars. That hasn't been possible for a long time now, and the last move we actually hired professionals for the heavy lifting.
You'll have to decide what is and isn't important to you, and how often you expect to move, etc. I recomend getting some perspective by watching George Carlin's rant on 'stuff' a few times.
This would mean that if you sue Huge-Mega-Corp for something and win you would collect actual damages (ie restitution, money to compensate you for what you actually lost/suffered)
It really depends on how you determine 'actual' damages. They should include reasonable legal fees and an assessment for interest for the time taken to settle. Having gotten about $3500 from the insurance company of the idiot that totaled a restored car that I had already invested about $8000 and a lot of time...
Things are pretty stacked in favor of the big organization with lawyers on the payroll in just about every situation. There's got to be a way to get a quick, reasonably fair hearing to set the baseline settlement (or throw it out completely like the examples from this PanIP). Then if one of the parties wants to challenge that, the one challenging should have some liability for the other's legal fees (within limits) if they still lose.
The Patent Office is unequivocal. "All patents are presumed valid once they're issued," says Brigid Quinn, deputy director of public affairs.
This would be funny if it wasn't true, but there decisions are legally binding until challenged, as you say.
I was talking to a friend about a more libertarian or maybe even anarchistic legal system where the government wouldn't be the only entity with the legal standing to represent the public at large. I know, there could be real problems (like SLAPP style prosecutions for any law they can find on the books). He's really much more libertarian than me, since I think there really is a constructive role for government to play, if only they were effective and actually represented the people.
He was telling me that there is a legal mechanism where you can try to force the state to take legal action. I forget the technical legal term, but it basically translates as "do your job", and he was telling me about an example (which I also forgot). Maybe the patent office can be sued under this framework, but you still have the basic catch 22 that they didn't do their job in the first place, so it will be difficult to enforce an effective remedy.
The patent office takes a while to actually grant a patent (not that I know how long this is, but probably several years).
It boggles the mind to think about what kind of qualification process would keep letting through all sorts of patents that any semi-competent engineer would recognize as obvious and/or prior art. Maybe it is just easier to rubber stamp the applications so they can get to the bar early.
The whole idea of software patents is pretty dubious to begin with, but don't they have anyone who knows a thing about systems and software? It seems to me that anything claimed in these patents was nothing more than obvious applications of HTTP technology. Maybe CERN could have patented it all in the beginning, but they made it available to all of us, and some idiot is claiming he owns some piece of that.
Seems to me that the solution is somewhat obvious, and implied in the article. It is likely that they will try to sue some of the big players with deep pockets if they can collect enough in settlements. Don't you think Amazon would be well served to help these little guys squash this thing in the first round before it gets any momentum.
Using the Cathedral and Bazaar model, he claims that only Cathedral model has been working well for free books, or books in general. I think it may be too early to decide this yet.
There has been some experimentation with collaborative fiction, but I suspect it is rare that it gains any traction. The example in the sibling comment of 'fanfic' is probably most workable because there is an existing 'created world' to establish a framework and characters, etc. I would say this type of thing is completely different and has different motivations than what drives authors to create original fiction. Software is naturally a more collaborative process. Design in general is; maybe it is that complexity requires many minds.
Particularly the RIAA, as featured in a recent slashdot posting, is using piracy as a smokescreen to keep the barriers to entry high because they make more money on million sellers.
For the MPAA, I think it is different as the barriers to entry are pretty high for motion pictures. They don't like their own DVD products cutting into theature box office, so maybe they really are more concerned with piracy. At current bandwidth, I'd be surprised if P2P style exchanges are really that big of a problem for them, but mass produced grey market sales of actual discs probably is. They should be able to attack this problem without pissing off customers with restrictive DRM, but they seem to be heading down the wrong path.
Clearly the grandparent comment is claiming they are the same in this respect. The parent thinks that enough people will put up with it to make lots of money for the current industry players. They are different in that the digital copy can be just as usable as the original, in some cases identical.
I claim DRM will fail for similar reasons to 'anti-books' as they are called. If what they do (with DRM) to a CD or DVD to make it uncopyable, and usable on exactly one computer also makes it less usable on standard audio and video hardware, I think they could lose it all very quickly. As long as the average consumer can use the media he bought in any number of players (including old ones), they have a chance of selling them. But if DRM means you lose the right of first sale property, which includes the right to lend the media to a friend and such, the average joe will quickly reject this junk.
There is also a growing number of people that won't buy it unless they retain basic fair use copying rights. I'm one of them, as are a lot of people on slashdot. I don't have any MP3 or Ogg devices yet, but I'm likely to convert my entire music collection to this type of system in the next five years (give or take). I'm quite confident that there will be enough material that doesn't have these ridiculous restrictions that I won't feel I'm missing anything, and frankly if an artist lets their work get released in this way, I don't need them.
You can't fix it if some nut job nukes NY or London.
No, you can't, but the information necessary to build a bomb is already out their. It's not how widely disseminated the information is, but whether a determined person could get it if they want to. Protecting the world from terrorism is a social problem, not a technical one, and it isn't served by treating scientists and technologists like idiots who can't tell the difference between general and specific information. The experts in a given field are better qualified to determine which is which, and draw up guidlines for their colleagues than any government functionary.
Most specific information that should be considered 'sensitive' in the sense we are discussing is very time sensitive. If there are vulnerabilities, they need to be disclosed to everyone that 'needs to know' so that the issues can be corrected. If an information leak would expose a vulnerability, then you had better be working on a solution, or changing procedures over time just to break up patterns. The best way to keep an attacker from being able to exploit patterns is not to have them. Often easier said than done, but if there is a pattern whether designed in, or just by default, you've got to assume that a determined attacked can and will discover it. You've got to randomize.
I understand the general point, but I really think you have to look very hard when anybody suggests that we are safer if knowledge of X is better kept from the general public. Clearly, there are whole categories of specific knowledge that only expose vulnerabilities, and don't help further public knowledge in any helpful way. We know that publishing the existence of security holes in software is generally a good thing because it help admins keep up on and close down vulnerabilities, but we are a little more careful about disseminating the exact nature of potential exploits (at least until there is a good fix). Publishing lists of sights that are vulnerable in a specific way is not helpful. Do we need the government to tell us which is which? I think not.
I think Bill Joy goes to far as well. The type of information we are talking about is basic science and technology, not specific stuff. The article is really more talking about having clear guidlines of what to publish and what not. Given clear distictions, which the field experts are more qualified to make than the government, people will intelligently self-censor just like we already do with system security issues. That is what happened in the case cited in the article. They pulled a few specific examples to an unpublished appendix. I'm sure that if you have a need to know (i.e. you are in a role where you might encounter the specific threat), you will be able to get the appendix too.
What Joy is proposing is essentially security through obscurity, and it is a losing proposition. All the social progress that has been made comes from openness, not fear. What is important is that people pay attention to what knowledge is being used for, and what people around you are up to. If a 'fundamentalist' of any stripe can learn a destructive technology without anyone ever talking person to person deeply enough to get a real sense of the them, then there is great danger.
What this bungled attempt to censor scientific publishing shows clearly is that the administration does not understand that terrorism and protecting ourselves from it is a social problem, not a technical one. You have to trust that most people are well meaning and intelligent enough to contribute to the solution. We all have the same goal, but there is disagreement about methods.
The FBI doesn't even trust other government agencies enough to share critical information. Their culture is so broken that it is disfunctional, and it is clear to everyone, but nothing happens to change it. It sure would be refreshing to see the director of the FBI say, "We might have been able to stop this. We failed, I'm sorry". I'd trust someone who said this to actually try to fix the problem.
Not to disagree with any of this, you seem to have gotten my point, but from a different angle.
BUT...if you try to manufacture and sell them on any large scale, it won't be long before the FCC shuts you down.
That's why it is necessary to get the general concept of SDR transmitters approved. The question is what rules support SDR in an Open Source context. The GNUradio people are experimenting with hardware now, not necessarily in the US, so FCC rules might not come into play. If I understand correctly, you have a wide-band digital front end driving a software controlled radio transceiver. The system software plus the tranceiver define how it can work. Once the radio part is programmed, there is full access to the a wide chunk of some part of an overall spectrum, so you can limit the transmit power, and generally what bands can be programmed in the transceiver, but any fine grained control would have to be in the software.
I'm not saying they can't regulate it, just that any regulation is difficult to justify except basic power level limits, and a requirement not to interfere with other uses. Again, we have a stark choice of either freedom with responsibility, or very intrusive regulation that would have to outlaw Open Source or be unenforceable. You'd have to make it illegal to re-flash your SDR unless you are a certified technition or something.
Also, if you think that receiving signals isn't against the law, think again!...
Same thing on the receive side. SDR makes a joke of current regulations. If you want your transmissions private, you had better use sufficiently strong encryption. Once the hardware and the software exist, you can't assume it isn't available to an adversary, regulations or not. Again, the only way to maintain the current situation is with silly laws that do nothing to actually protect the communication. Simple prudent operational precautions would tell you not to rely on this kind of protection, and it is irresponsible to do so.
At some level, the right to transmit and receive radio signals are basic freedoms. As the paper points out the transmit side has a natural connection to free speech rights, and restrictions really have to be justified. Although this seems to have been understood when the FCC was first established, and they did it anyway because there was a technical need. If you can transmit without bothering other spectrum users, there should be a presumption that it is ok to do so. On the receive side, I seem to recall that there is legal precident for a basic right to receive signals. I don't recall how the restrictions you mention are handled. A good analogy might be with the windows of your home. Just because something is visible from the street doesn't make it perfectly legal to go out of your way to peek in. Prudence tells you to draw the shades as well if you really care about privacy.
What has this got to do with anything being discussed? The registry is a useless crock, and it has nothing to do with understanding anything about an ELF executable.
Below the filesystem size quantum, you don't save anything anymore. You can't allocate less than a page of memory either.
Beyond some point, the article is really just silliness, interesting or not. Below 512 bytes, your not going to save anything on any system. Ok, there are filesystems that compress things further for squeezing into flash memory and such, so maybe there are some marginally useful applications, but still the header overlapping is a bit much to be worth considering.
Who says the telecom industry is needed to do this? Look at the spread of WiFi, it's driven by individuals and organizations putting in infrastructure for their own needs, and for the most part, the telcom industry is out of the loop. Home users that share DSL over WiFi could be targetted, but most ISPs have a pretty Laissez Faire attitude about this unless you really spike up your overall bandwidth. Some companies don't even like you sharing with a wired network in your house, but others do nothing to actively prevent it.
As we emerge from recession, the smart money will be trying to get ahead of the curve so they can be ready with product when people are ready to buy. The entrenched monopoly players can try to stop this with legislated and regulated restrictions, but there is always a way around if you are creative enough. Any given interest has a proprietary stake in only a very small part of the overall spectrum, and the process is by law required to accomidate the needs and desires of the public at large. What industry strategy could keep all of the spectrum locked up?
Some of the owners of existing licenses are on pretty shaky financial footing anyway, and opening their spectrum for more flexible sharing policies could be a way out. Buy them out and/or compensate them for the money they already sank into licenses and you might be able to create a new commons spectrum for flexible sharing and experimentation. There is so much potential for growth of services that it could easily be way more profitable than any existing plans. Yes, it would hurt some of the entrenched players, but none of them can lock up enough resources to keep enforcing monopoly conditions. This only works if there is a shortage, and it is pretty clear from the paper that the shortage has been only in our ability to be creative about sharing the space. The only monopolies are in narrow bands of allocated spectrum, the rest is pretty wide open if appropriate sharing rules are put in place.
Particularly with the 'underlay' concept, if you could quitely start using spectrum in ways that don't interfere with existing uses, who would know? In the regulatory space, spectrum license holders are always arguing against new uses because they *might* interfere with their bands even though there is precious little evidence that there would be problems.
Of course, this is the big conceptual problem with Open/Free Source SDR in general. Recieving is fine, but as soon as you want to transmit, the FCC wants to regulate the device. Now you are getting into the same problems you have with Open Source and DRM, if the end user has control, they can circumvent any controls by taking them out and recompliling. Buggy or malicious software could interfere in a big way, although the range of the interference would be limited by limiting the power of the transmitter which couldn't be easily overriden.
I like the paper's analogy to ships on the ocean, and I think it is very accurate for spectrum use. Most of the time you can put on the autopilot and sleep without much danger, but you'd better be on watch to adjust your course when you're near the shipping lanes. In any location, most of the spectrum will be silent most or even all of the time, and most modern recievers are pretty good at cancelling interference, so nobody will even notice if you use nearby frequencies.
The TV bands have all kinds of space in them, and there is all sorts of interference already unrelated to unlicensed transmitters. I'm still using my TV antenna in an urban area, and the big problem is multipath interference from all the large steel frame buildings. I wouldn't have any way to know that unused channels were being used for underlay digital comm., and I wouldn't care much either.
Yes, the analogy to the WinModem is more or less accurate, except that the bandwidth is much more, so this is pretty high speed stuff. See the GNUradio stuff (on/. a week or two back, or just Google or try the logical domain names gnuradio.*). There were some links to this idea in the/. interview, but the open specrum stuff was pretty raw. This paper is very well written and a pretty complete description of the important issues.
The point has been made that the specific purpose equivalents will be simpler, cheaper and use much less power than the same thing done with SDR, so you are going to need other compelling reasons to want SDR. The other point is that with time, Moore's law makes the SDR shrink in cost and power to the point that it is practical in a lot of situations. If instead of a car radio, you have a car computer with an SDR, it would be able to do AM, FM, TV, GPS, Digital Radio,... as well as managing data for the car, and downloading music from your collection at home.
The few, in turn, guarantee $$$ to the government. Anything that threatens this simply will never happen.
Yes, this is the primary danger that might keep anything like this from being implemented anytime soon. OTOH, just like the DRM debates, there are powerful forces on both sides. WiFi exploded onto the scene in the last few years, and a lot of people are making money selling the equipment. They have $$$ to spend on politics too.
The basic competition is between existing network providers who own licenses to pieces of the spectrum and equipment manufacturers who stand to make billions selling hardware. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I think there is a lot more potential money to be made in harwdare than existing and near term network services.
At some level, I think this is an opportunity for the US to jump ahead of Europe in terms of wireless technology. The 3G stuff is coming on more slowly than expected both because the networks are trying to get as much as they can from their existing equipment, and the fact that the 3G apps are not that compelling. WiFi is also cutting into the potential market for 3G.
You also have to look at how this relates to telcos and ISPs. They want to maximize what they can make from their sunk infrastructure investments, and the telcos have even been pretty successful in squeezing new players off the playing field. I don't really see how that can continue for long. The bottom line is that if established interests succeed in keeping the status quo for a while, they will become completely uncompetetive and disappear when the dam finally breaks.
One of the dynamics is that the US is behind in the deployment of both high speed internet (DSL and cable modem) and advanced celular systems. When growth and investment start to return, the smart money is going to be looking to leapfrog the competition, and the installed base they have to compete with is mostly a generation behind. Some interesting things were already happening before the bubble burst and swept a lot of it away. People are aware of all of this, and could be ready to move quickly when the economy really starts to turn up again.
This is their strategy, but it is likely to fail. The whole.NET vaperware strategy is probably the most dangerous part of this, but I'm still expecting it to pretty much fall flat. Six or eight months back I was more worried that it might start to catch on, but MS has squandered so much good will in their customer base and with developers that I think it is more or less DOA.
The DRM thing could be a problem too, but I really think it will be such a disaster that it will be completely rejected by consumers. The sticking point is not the basic erosion of fair use copying, but that it is going to be so broken in implementation that it will keep people from doing what they are supposed to be allowed. Average comsumers don't have a lot of patience for bogus technology that won't do what they want, and DRM is likely to screw them over and over. At least the single function DVD player will play the DVDs they rent and buy reliably, and a DRM enabled PC will fail to do this often enough to make them royally pissed off. Put that in your business model and smoke it!
I use my real name, but I'm not that worried about employers looking at my comments. I've always liked the idea that you should:
Live never to be embarassed about anything said about you
Probably a bit mangled, but it's from Richard Bach's
Illusions
. He has all this little quotes attributed to "The Messia's Handbook" that was given to him in the story. The way I take that is that you however you choose to present yourself in the world, don't worry too much about how others take it. Your always going to be misinterpreted, sometimes maliciously, but if you worry about it too much, you won't be very authentic. OTOH, if your being deliberately stupid, maybe you'd better hide your identity.
I kind of wish I could go back and re-read some of my very old participation in netnews groups. Ok, so maybe it proves I wasted more time than I should have posting at work, but I have enough slack to cover a bit of that;-). Some of this is probably archived on dusty tapes, but I don't think the on-line archives go back that far (I'm most interested in '83+ timeframe).
You can take it a lot of other ways too, like don't let that boyfriend have any naked pictures of you unless you won't be embarassed when they show up all over the internet.
Ok, so this is off-topic, but someone else started it. The idea of mapping your genome defects is only bad if the information is badly used. I don't think our social systems are really ready for this yet, particularly since the interpretation of the information isn't very advanced. The article is pretty clear about the limitations, but there are a lot of stupid people who will be frightened by the knowledge (of themselves, like the author of the article), or worse will use it to discriminate even though it is provably imperfect.
It's pretty funny that they are trying to subject the movie goer to this, after all, where are they going to go? Buy more overpriced snacks? It's a more captive audience.
Of course, you're going to have violate the DMCA to break the access controls at some point in the future if you want to skip over the adds and the FBI warning. At least you can turn the volume down and do something else for a few minutes.
No predictions, only fact: $18 billion loss [economist.com] in 1998. See about half way down the article.
This isn't what I'm talking about. I mean an actual reported loss regardless of accounting tricks. This is an article about the cost of options, and what they say about MS is a 4.5B profit becomes an 18B loss when you account for cost of options given to employees (the bulk to executives, no doubt). The problem is that this doesn't really relate to operational profit/loss, although it is pretty important WRT stockholder value. I'm talking about the former.
I'm not going to continue a back and forth about gun control in general, but I'd like to address a couple of points.
I am concerned about the similarity (you chose not to quote that part), but guns are actually used in crimes quite a lot (let's not get into whether a gun owner is more or less likely to commit a crime). The point is that if a gun is used, it is by definition a serious and violent crime (even if just a threat). The second ammendment clearly points to the need to regulate guns, and fingerprinting doesn't mean you would always know who currently has the gun or their address, just someplace to start.
I know about the studies about concealed carry, but I still don't want this to be common, and particularly not without mandatory training and licensing.
No cops aren't required to protect you, but most of them are good people who are very interested in serving their community. There just aren't (nor do I want there to be) enough of them to be everywhere. Most of them would not hesitate to put their lives on the line to stop this guy, and they are well trained not to endanger the rest of us while they are doing it. Your comment suggests a lack of respect for those who do this very difficult job.
No, I would trust myself with a gun, I just have little or no interest in carrying one. I have fired guns, and I'm a pretty good shot within limitations. You make it sound like making a 'citizens arrest' is an easy thing. It's not, and unless you know yourself and how you will react pretty well, I would not recommend it. At the right angle, I'm pretty sure I could disable his van and still be able to drive away with my 4000+ pound car, and I think he would be caught pretty quickly. Of course, all of this is stupid hypotheticals, because nobody really knows how they would react in the situation.
I apologize if my earlier post seemed to be emphasizing the negative.
Not an issue, I understood the context, I just wanted to make the point that it could still help even when it wasn't a complete cure/solution.
The progress in all technologies is amazing when you really think about it, medical tech. included. Even though there are still a lot of problems way beyond current medical science, the basic science is uncovering the seeds of understanding biological systems in ways never before possible. Computers are no small part of it either as we enter the age where you can't do much science without processing a lot more information than humanly possible.
What was the title of the TV show (Rescue 51, I think?) that introduced many of us to the idea of EMTs saving lives in the field? They could barely touch a patient before establishing a link to the doctors at the trauma center, and now they have CPR machines that almost anyone can use.
My 'extreme' sport is sailing a 30 foot catamaran around on Lake Michigan, so I'm interested in advanced first aid stuff (when I can afford the supplies and equipment). So far we haven't ventured beyond sight of land, so the risks are lower, but I try to be as prepared for problems as practical.
Slashdot Mirror
Better would be to start re-thinking some things more fundamentally. As you suggest, there are new degrees of freedom that could be used to enhance the interface for 3D control. The idea of 'gestures' could be very useful too, but you have to maintain compatibility both with people's familiarity with using mice, and the system and application support for mice.
I think it would be cooler if one of these could be strapped to your hand or wrist so you could still type on the keyboard without putting it down, and also access pointer functions more or less seemlessly. This needs some real hard core UI research and experimentation.
The nature of the problem was that all the switches were running the same or very close versions of the software, and they all had the same bug. It's a good thing MS isn't making much headway in the server, firewall and router spaces, or we would have lots of problems like this one already. (ok, it's a lame joke really, but not too hard to imagine a real scenario)
When the move date looms and you haven't done any of the above yet, make sure you have lots of extra boxes (plastic bags for clothes and that wrapping film are really useful) and just start packing and throwing. Some organization is good, and make sure you are careful about the things you really need to use in the near future (one theory is everything else should be pitched). Except for those small number of important boxes, your not going to unpack the rest for a year or more anyway.
We've been in our house (first one) for almost a year and a half, and I'm almost done with moving box archeology (it can be fun sometimes). Except for the dozen or so boxes recently moved from the garage to the basement to make room to store a sister's pop-up trailer. Then there's the stuff from another sister who's off at graduate school, and the other sister currently semi long term consulting out of town who is going to drop her appartment here and put more boxes in the basement. Theoretically, owning a house is a longer term proposition than renting, so I don't mind accumulating stuff, but I try to keep a little control over it. When I was younger I moved between the East Coast and Chicago several times, mostly in very overpacked cars. That hasn't been possible for a long time now, and the last move we actually hired professionals for the heavy lifting.
You'll have to decide what is and isn't important to you, and how often you expect to move, etc. I recomend getting some perspective by watching George Carlin's rant on 'stuff' a few times.
It really depends on how you determine 'actual' damages. They should include reasonable legal fees and an assessment for interest for the time taken to settle. Having gotten about $3500 from the insurance company of the idiot that totaled a restored car that I had already invested about $8000 and a lot of time ...
Things are pretty stacked in favor of the big organization with lawyers on the payroll in just about every situation. There's got to be a way to get a quick, reasonably fair hearing to set the baseline settlement (or throw it out completely like the examples from this PanIP). Then if one of the parties wants to challenge that, the one challenging should have some liability for the other's legal fees (within limits) if they still lose.
The Patent Office is unequivocal. "All patents are presumed valid once they're issued," says Brigid Quinn, deputy director of public affairs.
This would be funny if it wasn't true, but there decisions are legally binding until challenged, as you say.
I was talking to a friend about a more libertarian or maybe even anarchistic legal system where the government wouldn't be the only entity with the legal standing to represent the public at large. I know, there could be real problems (like SLAPP style prosecutions for any law they can find on the books). He's really much more libertarian than me, since I think there really is a constructive role for government to play, if only they were effective and actually represented the people.
He was telling me that there is a legal mechanism where you can try to force the state to take legal action. I forget the technical legal term, but it basically translates as "do your job", and he was telling me about an example (which I also forgot). Maybe the patent office can be sued under this framework, but you still have the basic catch 22 that they didn't do their job in the first place, so it will be difficult to enforce an effective remedy.
It boggles the mind to think about what kind of qualification process would keep letting through all sorts of patents that any semi-competent engineer would recognize as obvious and/or prior art. Maybe it is just easier to rubber stamp the applications so they can get to the bar early.
Seems to me that the solution is somewhat obvious, and implied in the article. It is likely that they will try to sue some of the big players with deep pockets if they can collect enough in settlements. Don't you think Amazon would be well served to help these little guys squash this thing in the first round before it gets any momentum.
There has been some experimentation with collaborative fiction, but I suspect it is rare that it gains any traction. The example in the sibling comment of 'fanfic' is probably most workable because there is an existing 'created world' to establish a framework and characters, etc. I would say this type of thing is completely different and has different motivations than what drives authors to create original fiction. Software is naturally a more collaborative process. Design in general is; maybe it is that complexity requires many minds.
For the MPAA, I think it is different as the barriers to entry are pretty high for motion pictures. They don't like their own DVD products cutting into theature box office, so maybe they really are more concerned with piracy. At current bandwidth, I'd be surprised if P2P style exchanges are really that big of a problem for them, but mass produced grey market sales of actual discs probably is. They should be able to attack this problem without pissing off customers with restrictive DRM, but they seem to be heading down the wrong path.
I claim DRM will fail for similar reasons to 'anti-books' as they are called. If what they do (with DRM) to a CD or DVD to make it uncopyable, and usable on exactly one computer also makes it less usable on standard audio and video hardware, I think they could lose it all very quickly. As long as the average consumer can use the media he bought in any number of players (including old ones), they have a chance of selling them. But if DRM means you lose the right of first sale property, which includes the right to lend the media to a friend and such, the average joe will quickly reject this junk.
There is also a growing number of people that won't buy it unless they retain basic fair use copying rights. I'm one of them, as are a lot of people on slashdot. I don't have any MP3 or Ogg devices yet, but I'm likely to convert my entire music collection to this type of system in the next five years (give or take). I'm quite confident that there will be enough material that doesn't have these ridiculous restrictions that I won't feel I'm missing anything, and frankly if an artist lets their work get released in this way, I don't need them.
No, you can't, but the information necessary to build a bomb is already out their. It's not how widely disseminated the information is, but whether a determined person could get it if they want to. Protecting the world from terrorism is a social problem, not a technical one, and it isn't served by treating scientists and technologists like idiots who can't tell the difference between general and specific information. The experts in a given field are better qualified to determine which is which, and draw up guidlines for their colleagues than any government functionary.
Most specific information that should be considered 'sensitive' in the sense we are discussing is very time sensitive. If there are vulnerabilities, they need to be disclosed to everyone that 'needs to know' so that the issues can be corrected. If an information leak would expose a vulnerability, then you had better be working on a solution, or changing procedures over time just to break up patterns. The best way to keep an attacker from being able to exploit patterns is not to have them. Often easier said than done, but if there is a pattern whether designed in, or just by default, you've got to assume that a determined attacked can and will discover it. You've got to randomize.
I think Bill Joy goes to far as well. The type of information we are talking about is basic science and technology, not specific stuff. The article is really more talking about having clear guidlines of what to publish and what not. Given clear distictions, which the field experts are more qualified to make than the government, people will intelligently self-censor just like we already do with system security issues. That is what happened in the case cited in the article. They pulled a few specific examples to an unpublished appendix. I'm sure that if you have a need to know (i.e. you are in a role where you might encounter the specific threat), you will be able to get the appendix too.
What Joy is proposing is essentially security through obscurity, and it is a losing proposition. All the social progress that has been made comes from openness, not fear. What is important is that people pay attention to what knowledge is being used for, and what people around you are up to. If a 'fundamentalist' of any stripe can learn a destructive technology without anyone ever talking person to person deeply enough to get a real sense of the them, then there is great danger.
What this bungled attempt to censor scientific publishing shows clearly is that the administration does not understand that terrorism and protecting ourselves from it is a social problem, not a technical one. You have to trust that most people are well meaning and intelligent enough to contribute to the solution. We all have the same goal, but there is disagreement about methods.
The FBI doesn't even trust other government agencies enough to share critical information. Their culture is so broken that it is disfunctional, and it is clear to everyone, but nothing happens to change it. It sure would be refreshing to see the director of the FBI say, "We might have been able to stop this. We failed, I'm sorry". I'd trust someone who said this to actually try to fix the problem.
BUT...if you try to manufacture and sell them on any large scale, it won't be long before the FCC shuts you down.
That's why it is necessary to get the general concept of SDR transmitters approved. The question is what rules support SDR in an Open Source context. The GNUradio people are experimenting with hardware now, not necessarily in the US, so FCC rules might not come into play. If I understand correctly, you have a wide-band digital front end driving a software controlled radio transceiver. The system software plus the tranceiver define how it can work. Once the radio part is programmed, there is full access to the a wide chunk of some part of an overall spectrum, so you can limit the transmit power, and generally what bands can be programmed in the transceiver, but any fine grained control would have to be in the software.
I'm not saying they can't regulate it, just that any regulation is difficult to justify except basic power level limits, and a requirement not to interfere with other uses. Again, we have a stark choice of either freedom with responsibility, or very intrusive regulation that would have to outlaw Open Source or be unenforceable. You'd have to make it illegal to re-flash your SDR unless you are a certified technition or something.
Also, if you think that receiving signals isn't against the law, think again! ...
Same thing on the receive side. SDR makes a joke of current regulations. If you want your transmissions private, you had better use sufficiently strong encryption. Once the hardware and the software exist, you can't assume it isn't available to an adversary, regulations or not. Again, the only way to maintain the current situation is with silly laws that do nothing to actually protect the communication. Simple prudent operational precautions would tell you not to rely on this kind of protection, and it is irresponsible to do so.
At some level, the right to transmit and receive radio signals are basic freedoms. As the paper points out the transmit side has a natural connection to free speech rights, and restrictions really have to be justified. Although this seems to have been understood when the FCC was first established, and they did it anyway because there was a technical need. If you can transmit without bothering other spectrum users, there should be a presumption that it is ok to do so. On the receive side, I seem to recall that there is legal precident for a basic right to receive signals. I don't recall how the restrictions you mention are handled. A good analogy might be with the windows of your home. Just because something is visible from the street doesn't make it perfectly legal to go out of your way to peek in. Prudence tells you to draw the shades as well if you really care about privacy.
What has this got to do with anything being discussed? The registry is a useless crock, and it has nothing to do with understanding anything about an ELF executable.
Beyond some point, the article is really just silliness, interesting or not. Below 512 bytes, your not going to save anything on any system. Ok, there are filesystems that compress things further for squeezing into flash memory and such, so maybe there are some marginally useful applications, but still the header overlapping is a bit much to be worth considering.
As we emerge from recession, the smart money will be trying to get ahead of the curve so they can be ready with product when people are ready to buy. The entrenched monopoly players can try to stop this with legislated and regulated restrictions, but there is always a way around if you are creative enough. Any given interest has a proprietary stake in only a very small part of the overall spectrum, and the process is by law required to accomidate the needs and desires of the public at large. What industry strategy could keep all of the spectrum locked up?
Some of the owners of existing licenses are on pretty shaky financial footing anyway, and opening their spectrum for more flexible sharing policies could be a way out. Buy them out and/or compensate them for the money they already sank into licenses and you might be able to create a new commons spectrum for flexible sharing and experimentation. There is so much potential for growth of services that it could easily be way more profitable than any existing plans. Yes, it would hurt some of the entrenched players, but none of them can lock up enough resources to keep enforcing monopoly conditions. This only works if there is a shortage, and it is pretty clear from the paper that the shortage has been only in our ability to be creative about sharing the space. The only monopolies are in narrow bands of allocated spectrum, the rest is pretty wide open if appropriate sharing rules are put in place.
Of course, this is the big conceptual problem with Open/Free Source SDR in general. Recieving is fine, but as soon as you want to transmit, the FCC wants to regulate the device. Now you are getting into the same problems you have with Open Source and DRM, if the end user has control, they can circumvent any controls by taking them out and recompliling. Buggy or malicious software could interfere in a big way, although the range of the interference would be limited by limiting the power of the transmitter which couldn't be easily overriden.
I like the paper's analogy to ships on the ocean, and I think it is very accurate for spectrum use. Most of the time you can put on the autopilot and sleep without much danger, but you'd better be on watch to adjust your course when you're near the shipping lanes. In any location, most of the spectrum will be silent most or even all of the time, and most modern recievers are pretty good at cancelling interference, so nobody will even notice if you use nearby frequencies.
The TV bands have all kinds of space in them, and there is all sorts of interference already unrelated to unlicensed transmitters. I'm still using my TV antenna in an urban area, and the big problem is multipath interference from all the large steel frame buildings. I wouldn't have any way to know that unused channels were being used for underlay digital comm., and I wouldn't care much either.
The point has been made that the specific purpose equivalents will be simpler, cheaper and use much less power than the same thing done with SDR, so you are going to need other compelling reasons to want SDR. The other point is that with time, Moore's law makes the SDR shrink in cost and power to the point that it is practical in a lot of situations. If instead of a car radio, you have a car computer with an SDR, it would be able to do AM, FM, TV, GPS, Digital Radio, ... as well as managing data for the car, and downloading music from your collection at home.
Yes, this is the primary danger that might keep anything like this from being implemented anytime soon. OTOH, just like the DRM debates, there are powerful forces on both sides. WiFi exploded onto the scene in the last few years, and a lot of people are making money selling the equipment. They have $$$ to spend on politics too.
The basic competition is between existing network providers who own licenses to pieces of the spectrum and equipment manufacturers who stand to make billions selling hardware. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I think there is a lot more potential money to be made in harwdare than existing and near term network services.
At some level, I think this is an opportunity for the US to jump ahead of Europe in terms of wireless technology. The 3G stuff is coming on more slowly than expected both because the networks are trying to get as much as they can from their existing equipment, and the fact that the 3G apps are not that compelling. WiFi is also cutting into the potential market for 3G.
You also have to look at how this relates to telcos and ISPs. They want to maximize what they can make from their sunk infrastructure investments, and the telcos have even been pretty successful in squeezing new players off the playing field. I don't really see how that can continue for long. The bottom line is that if established interests succeed in keeping the status quo for a while, they will become completely uncompetetive and disappear when the dam finally breaks.
One of the dynamics is that the US is behind in the deployment of both high speed internet (DSL and cable modem) and advanced celular systems. When growth and investment start to return, the smart money is going to be looking to leapfrog the competition, and the installed base they have to compete with is mostly a generation behind. Some interesting things were already happening before the bubble burst and swept a lot of it away. People are aware of all of this, and could be ready to move quickly when the economy really starts to turn up again.
The DRM thing could be a problem too, but I really think it will be such a disaster that it will be completely rejected by consumers. The sticking point is not the basic erosion of fair use copying, but that it is going to be so broken in implementation that it will keep people from doing what they are supposed to be allowed. Average comsumers don't have a lot of patience for bogus technology that won't do what they want, and DRM is likely to screw them over and over. At least the single function DVD player will play the DVDs they rent and buy reliably, and a DRM enabled PC will fail to do this often enough to make them royally pissed off. Put that in your business model and smoke it!
Live never to be embarassed about anything said about you
Probably a bit mangled, but it's from Richard Bach's
- Illusions
. He has all this little quotes attributed to "The Messia's Handbook" that was given to him in the story. The way I take that is that you however you choose to present yourself in the world, don't worry too much about how others take it. Your always going to be misinterpreted, sometimes maliciously, but if you worry about it too much, you won't be very authentic. OTOH, if your being deliberately stupid, maybe you'd better hide your identity.I kind of wish I could go back and re-read some of my very old participation in netnews groups. Ok, so maybe it proves I wasted more time than I should have posting at work, but I have enough slack to cover a bit of that ;-). Some of this is probably archived on dusty tapes, but I don't think the on-line archives go back that far (I'm most interested in '83+ timeframe).
You can take it a lot of other ways too, like don't let that boyfriend have any naked pictures of you unless you won't be embarassed when they show up all over the internet.
Ok, so this is off-topic, but someone else started it. The idea of mapping your genome defects is only bad if the information is badly used. I don't think our social systems are really ready for this yet, particularly since the interpretation of the information isn't very advanced. The article is pretty clear about the limitations, but there are a lot of stupid people who will be frightened by the knowledge (of themselves, like the author of the article), or worse will use it to discriminate even though it is provably imperfect.
Of course, you're going to have violate the DMCA to break the access controls at some point in the future if you want to skip over the adds and the FBI warning. At least you can turn the volume down and do something else for a few minutes.
This isn't what I'm talking about. I mean an actual reported loss regardless of accounting tricks. This is an article about the cost of options, and what they say about MS is a 4.5B profit becomes an 18B loss when you account for cost of options given to employees (the bulk to executives, no doubt). The problem is that this doesn't really relate to operational profit/loss, although it is pretty important WRT stockholder value. I'm talking about the former.
I am concerned about the similarity (you chose not to quote that part), but guns are actually used in crimes quite a lot (let's not get into whether a gun owner is more or less likely to commit a crime). The point is that if a gun is used, it is by definition a serious and violent crime (even if just a threat). The second ammendment clearly points to the need to regulate guns, and fingerprinting doesn't mean you would always know who currently has the gun or their address, just someplace to start.
I know about the studies about concealed carry, but I still don't want this to be common, and particularly not without mandatory training and licensing.
No cops aren't required to protect you, but most of them are good people who are very interested in serving their community. There just aren't (nor do I want there to be) enough of them to be everywhere. Most of them would not hesitate to put their lives on the line to stop this guy, and they are well trained not to endanger the rest of us while they are doing it. Your comment suggests a lack of respect for those who do this very difficult job.
No, I would trust myself with a gun, I just have little or no interest in carrying one. I have fired guns, and I'm a pretty good shot within limitations. You make it sound like making a 'citizens arrest' is an easy thing. It's not, and unless you know yourself and how you will react pretty well, I would not recommend it. At the right angle, I'm pretty sure I could disable his van and still be able to drive away with my 4000+ pound car, and I think he would be caught pretty quickly. Of course, all of this is stupid hypotheticals, because nobody really knows how they would react in the situation.
Not an issue, I understood the context, I just wanted to make the point that it could still help even when it wasn't a complete cure/solution.
The progress in all technologies is amazing when you really think about it, medical tech. included. Even though there are still a lot of problems way beyond current medical science, the basic science is uncovering the seeds of understanding biological systems in ways never before possible. Computers are no small part of it either as we enter the age where you can't do much science without processing a lot more information than humanly possible.
What was the title of the TV show (Rescue 51, I think?) that introduced many of us to the idea of EMTs saving lives in the field? They could barely touch a patient before establishing a link to the doctors at the trauma center, and now they have CPR machines that almost anyone can use.
My 'extreme' sport is sailing a 30 foot catamaran around on Lake Michigan, so I'm interested in advanced first aid stuff (when I can afford the supplies and equipment). So far we haven't ventured beyond sight of land, so the risks are lower, but I try to be as prepared for problems as practical.