But of course the lefties are ALWAYS accusing their opposition of their own sins.
And Republicans don't?
Usually not, actually.
The two parties attract two different types of compensated psychopaths. The Republicans attract the rule-bound, while the Democrats attract the anything-you-can-get-away-with. ("Politics is the Art of the Possible." -LBJ) This means the Republicans get the compulsive truth-tellers and the Democrats get the pathological liars.
Not all in either party are such, of course, but psychopaths ARE vastly overrepresented in politics. But the non-psychopaths of each party tend to have personal ethics similar to the psychopaths - which is why the two different styles are attracted to the two parties.
This is not to say there aren't other problems than compulsive lying with a rule-bound compensated psychopath, of course. (For starters, if you don't play EXACTLY by HIS particular set of rules, you suddenly find yourself on his scumbag list. Expect to be treated like a crook, terrorist, or trator.)
Understanding this is key to understanding the politics of the two major parties. Their members really DO think and act differently. And the members and/or supporters of each tend to become very confused when they expect the other sides' people to act like their own.
Are bullets taxed? im pretty sure bullets should have a heavey tax - say 150%? No? thought not, so dont tax the fucking internet you republican dick-head gun toting rednecks!
Last time I looked it was the Republicans that were trying to keep the taxes off the Internet (free market, create wealth, etc.) and the Democrats that were thirsting for another source of tax money.
= = = =
But of course the lefties are ALWAYS accusing their opposition of their own sins. It serves as a preemptive strike (so somebody who later points out the lefties' misbehavior looks like a "No, HE did it!" playground finger-pointer). And they place no value on honesty: Winning the argument with a lie is considered "intelligent" rather than "reprehensible". (I'd have said "dishonest" - but then lefties wouldn't understand that I meant something bad. B-) )
As for "Rednecks": Apparently, despite all their other rhetoric, lefites think racial and ethnic slurs are fair game if directed at the rural working class. (And I bet he either doesn't know or care that the term includes a reference to the assimilated indians and part-indians that form a significant component of it.)
Are we just talking about apps that mimic a telephone, or are we talking about all VoIP applications?
The sane thing to do would be to tax subscription VoIP/PSTN bridging. (PSTN = Public Switched Telephone Network.)
VoIP computer-to-computer connection is just another IP application. It lets you communicate with another computer user - but so does just about EVERY OTHER application on the Internet. (VoIP just happens to transmit voice, rather than the text streams of chat and IM, the compositions of email/blogs/web pages, the reference information of DNS, the "computer-as-person conversations" of telnet/rlogin/ssh, and so on.)
PSTN bridging creates a connection to the legacy telephone network, completing the emulation of the formaer service. You can use the "pay phone" model of outgoing calls only or the "customer line" model of a subscription that accepts PSTN calls to an assigned phone number. While it does have an Internet component, there's no question that it also has a PSTN component. It's also pretty clear that the PSTN component is the dominant functionality and the Internet component is just a new kind of "phone line" transport between the PSTN to the user.
So a logical thing to do would be to apply the tax to VoIP/PSTN bridging. This would leave pure IP applications untaxed, including computer-to-computer VoIP calls. And it would answer the fairness objections from the telephone companies.
= = = =
Alternatively, now might be a good time to review the tax structure on telephone service.
The tax to support the 911 service got hung on them as a convenient place to put it. The service was only available to telephone subscribers, so there was SOME fairness in that. But these days practically EVERYONE is a telephone subscriber, so fair allocation of the cost is not as much of an issue. And 911 is REALLY part of the dispatch functions of the emergency services (a convenience to replace fire/police callboxes and separate phone numbers for each service). It's not a necessary function of the telephone network. In fact, it's an expensive service provided BY the telephone network TO the emergency services. Shouldn't it be paid for out of the budgets of the services, rather than by a tax on phones (whose collection is ALSO a drain on the phone companies)?
Similarly, the rest of the taxes on phones are either related to specific telephone issues (funding regulatory boards, funds transfer between long-distance and local cariers related to the monopoly breakup, buying equipment for phone number portability) or yet another hidden government money grab on the consumer's pocket book for "public purposes" ("universal" and "lifeline" service subsidies, federal and local taxes). It's clearly appropriate to charge the phone-company specific fees to the phone company customers (and to VoIP/PSTN bridging customers SOLELY to the extent that they fund a function used by the bridgers as well). As for the rest: since the government isn't going to tax the Internet, it should take those taxes off the phone companies, too.
If the government wants to subsidize phone service for the poor, roll it into the welfare system (rather than soaking the other phone customers just because there's some mental resonance). If the government just wants to suck money out of the pockets of the citizens, lump it in with the other general taxes.
As for "universal service", why should the people in the cities pay for phones for people in the country? People in the cities moved there, and pay MUCH higher living costs, in order to be in closer communication with other people. If somebody in the boonies wants a wire strung 50 miles to get a benefit of city living in his lower-cost country location, let him pay for it. (Or get a cell phone and a cradle, and maybe a high-gain directional antenna, if he's within some services' coverage area.) There's no "Internet universal service" - and the government is trying to DEregulate local phone service and allow othe
Just have an encrypted "address card" sent upon connection.
Encryption doesn't give any security, since the DEcryption routine and key has to be present in every set of 911 support software in the country. Only a matter of time until that's compromised. (Not to mention that the need to keep it secret creates a barrier against authors of open-source 911 software authors.)
Better would be a "send address" function at the user's option. But that doesn't solve the problems with mobile and VPN users I mentioned previously.
So the address has to come from the network and the VoIP bridging service.
Getting it from the network carries risks of its own. In principle it could be accessed by governments and used to find the address of ANY connection, destroying anonymity. Imagine its use by a totalitarian government hunting down readers of "forbidden" information and contributors to a dissident blog.
As for the emergency calls, that's rather easy. Just have an encrypted "address card" sent upon connection. If not encrypted then at least signed.
And when you're using your laptop on the road and call 911, they should go to your home or office? No, I don't think so.
Ditto if you're at home but happen to be VPNing in to work - and the emergency services go to your work.
And then there's Joe Random User. Requiring him to set up an address as part of his internet install (or even his internet phone install) complicates the process. So many of them won't set it up. And others will set it up wrong - and not find out until they call for an ambulance and it doesn't come. And others will be suspicious that they're buying into a "caller ID" that might give out their ADDRESS to people they call. Or to people who call THEM. Even if it doesn't.
And it also puts your physical address on the machine in a well-known place. How long until some stalker cracks his target's machine and comes for her? Or the latest spammer worm carries an additional payload that creates a mailing address database for the spammer - LOTS of bucks in selling THAT one.
Sorry, I don't think that dog hunts.
Re:Just found Cringely's article on that, too.
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For example, since the record would be printed after the vote is cast, there's no way to do anything about it if the printed vote isn't correct. They can't remove the vote from the machine, and they can't let the voter cast another vote.
Sure they can. (Remember: The tape is not staying in the machine. The voter is taking it to the ballot box.)
Here's one way:
- The voter registers his choice and says "print it".
- The printer spits out the choices on the tape - but doesn't spit the final part.
- The voter examines the tape while it's STILL ATTACHED TO THE MACHINE.
- If he likes it he presses "accept".
- The machine records the vote.
- The machine finishes the tape with an OK flag.
- The voter tears off the tape and takes it to the pollworker.
- If he DOESN'T like it he presses "retry" or "cancel - change machines".
- The machine discards the vote.
- The machine finishes the tape with a VOID flag.
- If he hit "retry" he goes back and fixes his vote. If he hit "cancel - change machines" the machine spits out the authorization card.
Here's another way:
- The machine records the vote on the smartcard. (If the smartcard memory is too small, it records an index of the vote and keeps the vote record in volatile memory. The machine can save 'em all or keep a cache of the last several.)
- If the voter likes his vote he returns the ballot and the smartcard. The ballot is put in the ballot box and the smartcard reauthorized for the next voter.
- If the voter DOESN'T like his vote he complains to the poll worker. The poll worker reauthorizes the smartcard with a "retry" status and puts the spoiled ballot in the discard box.
- The voter votes again, preferably on the same machine. (Necessarily to the same machine if the card's memory is too small.) The machine deducts the voter's previous vote then goes ahead as if starting a fresh session.
- At poll closing the machines discard any remaining per-voter memory.
Note that if the smartcard holds the vote and the voter goes to a different machine, there's the possibility that the machine could end up with a negative vote total. This is OK. (As a check the machines can also keep a total of the number of initial vote and revote sessions, and no tally on any machine should be more negative than the number of revotes or more positive than the total number of vote/revote sessions, just as the sum across all machines should be non-negative and no greater than the number of initial vote sessions.)
And there's no way to know that the vote recorded on the memory card is the same as the vote printed.
There's NEVER a way to "know" that. That's the WHOLE POINT of having an audit trail and making the PRINTED tape the official vote - so you can catch it if the total is wrong.
But if a half-step is all that some county can afford, at least they'll be able to have some basic capability to audit.
This proposal has EXACTLY the same characteristics as the open voting system, except for the ability to MECHANICALLY recount the ballot reciepts (and any issues related to the voters having to tear off the tape manually).
What they didn't expect is an effective, organized opposition (e.g. Groklaw) [...]
Which is a classic error for any corporation looking at any volunteer effort - to assume that, because the volunteers are not doing this for a living with a corporate infrastructure behind them, they are incapable of organized, sustained, intelligent, and effective effort.
They make this mistake when analyzing the software development and support efforts. But FOSS' track record is finally bringing the most perceptive of them to an understanding of the error. (It's also rubbing the noses of the most outperformed in this simple truth, as well.)
Now SCO has made the same mistake when it came to our abilities on the legal and PR fronts. They targeted IBM's teams (a mistake in itself, since IBM has a long history of defending against bogus IP claim terrorism). Then they found themselves fighting a hydra-headded monster, with major brainpower, skills, and persistence. (And with NOBODY who could declare a surrender and make it stick. B-) )
Just found Cringely's article on that, too.
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"I had heard that they do have provision for adding one of their own printers."
Supposedly they all have a printer inside them. This is because the HAVA law reuires that they print out a record of the votes. Strangely, they decided that it was sufficient to print a total when the polls close, and not a continuous record of votes cast, so there's no way to prove that the total printed is correct, and thus no value in printing it.
I just found Cringely's March 11 Column which also says that, and suggests replacing the locked cover with one with a slot and using that to print a reciept. Several other documents available on the web (such as Maryland's report on the system) mention this printer without describing it as clearly as Cringely does.
The printer in question is a "tape printer", printing on a roll of tape like that of a cash register reciept. (Likely it IS a cash register / ATM machine printer.) The roll, according to Cringely, is large enough to print reciepts for all the votes that might be cast on a single machine in a day of voting.
So (in advance of obtaining replacements with a slot for the locking cover) just unlock the cover and print voter reciepts on the tape, as an initial emergency measure for the next election. They'd be too floppy to machine-recount, but they'd be more than adequate for a hand recount.
There we have it: Yes, we COULD use the Diebold machines (or probably any other brands, since the printer is federally mandated) with the open source software and NO additional hardware (except eventually the cover-with-a-slot), obtaining the printed audit trail we want.
Re:Modest proposal: Run it on Diebold's hardware?
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We could [run the software on Diebold machines], but it wouldn't do any good because the Diebold machines don't have page printers.
But do they have a serial or parallel port, or any kind of expansion connector for a printer? Even internally?
I had heard that they do have provision for adding one of their own printers. If the interface for that is standard one might come up with a cheap adapter to bring out a cable for an off-the-shelf printer, suitable for use with your software. (Unlike the machine itself, the printer interface doesn't have to be bulletproof because the voter checks the result.)
Also, according to one of the stories I've seen on them, at least some of them have a modem, to upload data after polls close. If that's standard, rather than an extra cost option present on only a few of the machines, it might be used to feed a printer - or a plain-paper fax machine!
Modest proposal: Run it on Diebold's hardware?
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One of the arguments against adopting this in some states is that they've already dumped a bunch of cash on proprietary systems, notably Diebold's.
But Diebods's system appears to be based on a hardware/OS platform that, at its core, is Wintel. No doubt the same is true for many, perhaps even all, of the others. (Even if they're not, Linux and the GNU toolset already has ports to many other processors/platforms, including essentially all commonly available current-generation processors.)
Perhaps it might be possible to port the Open Source voting software to the Diebold and/or other voting machines that have already been purchased?
The bulk of the machines you need are the ones in the booths. Plug an off-the-shelf printer into a Diebold and you're all set there. (No security issues on the printer itself, beyond making sure it's working.)
For the remainder, you only need one (plus maybe a spare) with a working OCR reader, sound card, and modem - for the blind readback and the uplink scan. Put that scanner on the exiting voting machine with the modem (as Diebold does on one of the machines for doing the final uplink to the state's database). Or put it on a cheap desktop, since the touchscreen is not necessary.
(Heck: Put the software for THAT machine on a bootable CD-ROM and you don't even need a special machine. Just borrow one from the school library for election day. Even if some BIOS-based malware managed to get activated and save the data, there's no confidentiality issues with what is on that machine. Any corruption of the data by malware would be detected in a manual recount, just like corruption in any other part of the total system.)
For future instalations you could go with generic touchscreen systems - or stick with the major vendors if their prices come down into the sanity range or if you want to pay a premium for ironclad hardware (like byers of "True Blue" PCs from IBM). The voting machine vendors could even make money as vendors of ruggedized commodity hardware if they don't have to maintain all that proprietary voting software.
[...] they were instructed to charge HIGH to add [print] capability, if it came to it.
I don't see this as (necessarily) a huge conspiracy to avoid an audit trail. This is likely a simple matter of Diebold achieving vendor lock-in with a limited feature set and then charging outrageous prices to add to that feature set.
Another non-conspiracy explanation: Printers have lots of moving parts and are highly subject to failure. That's especially true if they are used intermittently, with months of storage between uses. Now deploy thousands of them, with the entire corps of news media breathing down your neck over every glitch, and you have an enormous PR disaster in the making.
Given that other voting systems that have been in service for years (such as mechanical voting machines) leave no audit trail, they might have thought that the risks from the printers were far worse than the risks from bad PR over the lack of an audit trail.
That's doubly true because there are a LOT of places - not just the machines themselves - where the count might be corrupted, maliciously or through bugs. Without the trail such corruption wouldn't be detected, with the trail it almost certainly would, and would become big news. Build in a scandal-magnet and you need extra bucks to weather the resulting scandals and achieve the same risk-reward ratio.
But I, for one, am VERY glad to see the conspiracy theories circulate - and that they're naming Republicans. Because IMHO they're likely to lead to increased pressure (especially among Democrats, who otherwise could care less) to add the audit trail - and thus make elections even harder to rig than with the previous, non-electronic systems.
So much for ELUA terms to the effect of "You may make ONE archival copy."
If the medium fails in a couple years you need several. First, you need to make a string of them to "refresh" the data before the old disk fails. Second (since the failure is statistical) you need several copies to obtain the redundancy necessary to recover from any errors that occurred during storage. And you should also keep a previous generation, in case you need to recover from errors introduced during the copying process.
So you need a LOT more than "a SINGLE backup copy" to have an adequate backup. IMHO (IANAL) this makes such ELUA terms ludicrous, and a violation of your first-sale rights - another strike against the reasonableness of the portion of the DMCA that says such contracts are enforcible.
The paper you have in mind is "Distributed Ray Tracing" by Robert Cook, Thomas Porter, and Loren Carpenter,
Thanks for the reference.
(For those who don't want to follow the link and read the paper, the fifth item was translucency - which this approach models by using a probability function for whether the ray penetrates the surface, rather than splitting the ray into a pair of weighted rays and tracing them both - which rapidly explodes if you have several translucient surfaces in the image).
Distributed ray tracing isn't a "hack", though -- it's a fundamental principle of modern global-illumination rendering systems.
Yes, ray tracing is basic, as is Monte Carlo. Comgining them MIGHT be considered a hack, or straightforward synthesis. But that's not the breakthrough that I was referring to when I said "hack".
You need to remember the environment of the time.
This was twenty years ago - and compute power was twenty years farther back on the Moore's Law exponential. That's a LOT less bang for the buck. (Using the 1.5/year formulation you can do well over 8000 times as much computation now for the same dollar.)
Ray tracing was known to be "right". But it was also extremely compute intensive. So even basic ray tracing was considered dreadfully expensive. The bulk of the graphics research at the time was directed toward finding ways to get good rendering without incurring such a compute cost. Most of the work consisted of finding shortcuts, then patches to correct the artifacts of the shortcuts, then patches to correct the remaining artifacts of the shortcuts plus the previous patches.
Cook, Porter, and Carpenter bucked the trend and examined the combo of Ray Tracing with Monte Carlo, despite the multiplier over basic ray tracing. So far so good. And they found that Monet Carlo raytracing could do not one or two, but FIVE difficult "fuzzy" effects that were EACH considered difficult, producing images of breathtaking perfection. But that's STILL not what I called a "hack".
The breakthrough was recognizing that once you had incurred the small constant-factor cost over basic raytracing to achieve ONE of the effects, THE OTHER FOUR COULD BE HAD FOR FREE. THAT's the "hack".
Again consider the time. Look at the pictures in the Siggraph journal - where the best results of a dozen research projects might be published every month - with glitches, low resolution, visible triangles, and artifacts galore. Then comes this breathtaking shot of the billiard balls in action, with only its perfection to separate it from a high-resolution digitized photograph.
Over the next several years the combination of this algorithm with the explosion of computing power in the supercomputers of the time reduced video synthesis to a "solved problem".
Indeed, the explosion of supercomputer construction was largely driven by this very "killer app" - at one point well over half the Crays in existence had been ordered for entertainment and advertising video synthisis. (It was only later that the rampup of desktop power combined with this algorithm's parallizability that led to "render farms" of cheap, fast desktop workstations.)
Yes, it's a "fundamental principle of modern global-illumination rendering systems" - NOW. Put the emphasis on "modern". But (like the sealed-in-steel battery), at the time it was the brilliant breakthrough that, only after the fact, seems obvious.
That sounds like an old Siggraph presentation I saw a decade or two ago when I used to go to Siggraph. Lucasfilm, I think. (The fine sample picture in the article showed a motion-blured image of a set of pool balls in motion.)
When rendering an image using raytracing, there are several effects that are achieved by similar over-rendering processes. I.e. you ray-trace several times varying a paramter:
- Depth-of-field (use different points on the iris of the "camera", blurring things at different distances from the "focal plane".)
- Diffuse shadows (use different points on the diffuse light source(s) when computing the illumination of a point.)
- Motion blur (use different positions for the objects and "camera", evenly {or randomly} distributed along their paths during the "exposure" - ideally pick the positions of the whole set of objects by picking several intermediate times, rather than picking the postion of each object separately, to avoid artifacts of improper position combinations.)
- Anti-aliased edges. (Pick different points in the pixel when computing whether you hit or missed the object or which color patch of its texture you hit.)
As I recall there were about five effects that worked similarly, but I don't recall the other(s?) just now.
To do any one of them requires rendering the frame N times {for some N} with the parameter varied, then averaging the frames. (Eight times might be typical.) Naively, to do them all would require N**5 renderings - 32,768 raytracings of the frame to do all five.
The insight was to realize that the effects could be computed SIMULTANEOUSLY. Pseudorandomly pick one of the N from each effect's set for each frame and only render N frames, rather than N**5. Eight is a LOT smaller than 32K. B-)
Sounds like Nvidia ported this hack to the firmware for their accellerator.
a much more important question is how this material will be extracted.
Given that cleaning up the exhaust from burning plant material is well understood, I wouldn't sweat it.
It'd be more concerned with the chemical processes that "mobilize" the contaminants. They're talking about reacting them so they become much more water soluble. That's great for getting them out of the ground quickly. But it has the downside that it enormously increases the contamination level of the ground water.
If any of that water with the "mobilized" heavy metals makes it into the local ground water it's a serious hazard.
Probably easy to deal with, though: If they inject the "mobilizing" compounds just outside the borders of the contaminated area and suck the water to be used on the plants from the center (or downstream side if there's a significant undergound flow) they should pretty much get it all and use it to water the plants. The plants will get all the metals (except maybe for some of the mercury which will escape as vapor). Corn, in particular, is VERY thirsty so little water will get past the plants - and that will go back into the wells to be sucked out again.
When the toxins are pretty much leached out (along with most of the trace minerals), turn off the mobilizing compounds, keep pumping until the water comes clean. Any traces remaining will no longer be mobile and the ground should be at least as good as random ground.
This approach should also be useful for cleaning up naturally mineral-containing soil which has been unsuitable for farming up to now.
Do you have to be caught, let off scott free, and then caught again before anything happens?
Nope. That's just the top of three tiers. Bottom is one year. Here they are:
Up to five years and/or a fine for:
- Furthering another felony using spam
- Second offense. (Voilating state anti-spam laws also counts as first offense.)
Up to three years and/or a fine for:
- using cracked computers to send the spam
- using email accounts or domain registrations obtained with false i.d. info to send the spam
- Sending LOTS of spam: >2,500/day (24 hour period), 25,000/month (30 day period), or 250,000/year (1 year period).
- causing one or more persons to lose $5,000 or more within a one-year period. (I think this includes conning, system damage, and spam cleanup costs.)
- Obtaining anything of value totalling $5,000 or more within a one year period as a reslut of spamming. (I think this includes getting paid to spam.)
- Bossing three or more underlings to do the spam.
Up to one year and/or a fine for any other violations.
If you contribute disks, rather than giving them a list of things for the library to acquire, they're very likely to make them available.
Commercial distributions are nice. But given that it's free software you could download and burn the disks yourself.
If you do provide homeburned disks, be sure to clearly mark the disks with what they contain (leaving space for a library marking, too) and provide a hardcopy of the license with each - preferably as a jewelcase insert - so the librarian can be confident that such copies are legit.
(Getting one of the CD labeling kits and printing up a pretty label will also make 'em look more professional, increasing the librarian comfort level.)
I believe the outcome of the SCO suit is likely to put most of this to rest.
But if that is settled (in the favor of the open-source side) and similar suits continue to appear, we have a problem - and may need to retaliate in order to fix it.
The problem is that, even with insurance, the threat of suits increases the cost of using Open Source - even when the code itself is free. Either you buy insurance (possibly for as much as the shelf price of a competitive product) or you risk even more if you're sued.
Assuming the victims of the frivolous suits can't recover more than their own costs, we're left in the position of free software becoming more expensive than proprietary.
I wonder if, should that scenario develop, one could similarly raise the price of proprietary software by similarly going after customers when a closed-source product is found to contain purloined open-source code?
Probably a bad idea, morally and/or tactically. But I'd like to hear others' thoughts on it.
Well, in the case of blind people, the visual system of their brain is taken over by their auditory system. They end up processing sound they way sight is usually processed, allowing them to "see" with whatever limited audio cues are given to them. It's amazing how adaptive the brain is.
Not completely surprising - since the human brain also does some echolocation (and other processing of sound redundancies and missing energy in particular bands into information about nearby objects).
Both systems involve communication between processed sensory information and a model of the surrounding space. This implies that they might have evolved from a common system, whcih might make it easier for the nerve cells able to retarget from one to the other if one is hampered by lack of input. (Alternatively, lack of input in one system and expanded use of the other might make the heavily-used system grow or recruit more untargeted cells.)
Regarding echolocation: Try it. Go into a quiet empty room - preferably an empty one with hard walls and not much soft furniture and curtains - and close your eyes. Make a clicking sound with your mouth - or walk in shoes that make a sharp sound when they hit the floor. You'll be able to "feel" the walls as you approach them, and get a sense of the size of the room. Sound reflecting or absorbing objects may also be noticable.
Of course blind people make more use of this system. There was one case of a blind kid who could ride a bicycle on quiet streets using it - making clicking sounds with his mouth as the illumination.
Won't they issue patents for perpetual motion machines?
As I understand it.
Early in the patent office's life they required working models for everything. They quickly acquired quite a collection and storing them got expensive. So they stopped requiring them. (Many of the ones they alread had are now exhibited at the Smithsonian - the "nation's attic". That's one way to unload the storage cost. B-) )
But there was this RASH of perpeutal motion machine patent attempts, which was making the office very busy for useless stuff. Given that the current model of physics said (and still does say) that a more-energy-out-than-in perpetual motion machine was impossible so they were a waste of time, they didn't want to bother. But their mandate was not to certify functionality, but just issue temporary monopolies for inventions. So they compromised by retaining (reinstituting?) the requirement to provide a working model if you claimed perpetual motion. This got most of 'em out of their hair.
They still miss from time to time. Sometimes a highly-efficient system get initially rejected as a perpetual motion machine. (For instance: A very efficient still combining a tower to create a partial vacuum to reduce heat of vaporization requirements with a counter-current heat-exchanger to recycle it. You still have to input the heat of solution plus some more for inefficiencies.) But you can easily reverse that by showing where you're putting the energy in. Other times they'll just miss that you're claiming more out than in, and issue the patent if the device is novel.
The designs in the patents this guy got claim an energy input, and it's not immediately clear that he's claiming energy gain. (Especially since he mentions extraction of energy from the magnets, which would not be perpetual motion because it wouldn't last - just like devices with included batteries.) So maybe they got through as novel motor designs because it wasn't clear he was claiming more than 100% efficiency.
Like personalized ring tones and bust-your-thumbs instant messaging? B-)
They're TELEPHONE companies, dude!
They learned a long time ago that millions of customers dribbling in a buck here-and-there for "value added" services add up to BIG BUCKS! They COULD have provided this for free, as a convenient side-effect of the computers they used to cut the cost of their switching equipment. It's just a bunch of software hacks. But why give it away when they can CHARGE for it, and people are willing to PAY?
When will they get to lowering rates and giving cheap internet access? Hmm?
Cheap? Probably never. Or when they're going broke due to competition from other companies that ARE providing such a service cheaply. Even then they're probably price it at "all the traffic will bear" and count on their broad coverage to get them customers despite cheaper competition.
They WILL roll out non-cheap portable internet services - eventually. But don't hold your breath. Expect it to be folded into some other upgrade to their cell systems (like the upcoming move to QoS-enabled-IP based voice transport) rather than a standalone upgrade.
That's right BANG in the middle of channel 1 of the OFDM PHY proposal for IEEE 802.15 broadband wireless Personal Area Networks. (The proposed initial deployment was to use systems that cycle through bands 1 through 3 with each transmission.)
WUSB was also to be based on the OFDM proposal.
This should throw an extra monkeywrench into both of 'em. (Possibly more into the OFDM than the DS-CDMA version, though I'm not sure of that.)
= = = = = =
The OFDM and DS-CDMA factions couldn't agree on a standard. They DID agree on a "common signaling method" that both systems could talk with only tiny tweaks to the radios, and a protocol for time-dividing the slot, so if they both ended up depolyed they could take turns rather than stepping on each other (with lots of extra system numbers available for future systems to play, too).
Then they split up.
The DS-CDMA faction was ready with silicon, needing only any tiny tweaks resulting from the standardization process. IMHO The more populous OFDM faction is now trying to delay their deployment in various ways, most involving announcements of new products to delay adoption of the DS silicon.
One of those announcements was an "improvement" to the MAC layer (requiring the DS folk to delay deployment until they can get working OFDM silicon to test against or risk incompatibility). Another is the wireless USB announcement, based on the OFDM proposal, which might get system makers to hold off on adoption in the hope of getting something that plugs into the existing USB stack.
I wonder if this is the FCC saying "Use it or lose it!"?
But you can divide the bandwidth in the frequency domain instead of in the time domain, giving each client a continous bit stream but at a lower bitrate.
In that case you've still divided it - it's just a matter of how.
Using one big channel for your piconet and splitting it in time means you can divide it any way you want, and reconfigure the division on a message-by-message basis. Except for streaming applications, IP traffic is inherently "bursty" - so you can't predict what bandwidth each link will need in the next instant.
Dividing things up in the frequency domain means you have to reconfigure the radio links to adjust the bandwidth. This can cost you bandwidth for agreing to make the adjustment and time while things are settling. (Also - the radio is at the bottom of the comm stack while the info about traffic, to the extent there's any available beyond what's in the queues, is at the top - which may not be local.) And you can't participate in broadcasts - which means broadcast traffic gets replicated before transmition and chews up more bandwidth. You also have "receiver quieting" isuses, as another loud talker on a nearby frequency slice makes it hard for your receiver to pull the farther-away signal YOU want to hear out of the noise.
So you're far ahead to do your division in the time rather than the frequency domain, and save frequency domain splits for separating unrelated piconets.
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But of course the lefties are ALWAYS accusing their opposition of their own sins.
And Republicans don't?
Usually not, actually.
The two parties attract two different types of compensated psychopaths. The Republicans attract the rule-bound, while the Democrats attract the anything-you-can-get-away-with. ("Politics is the Art of the Possible." -LBJ) This means the Republicans get the compulsive truth-tellers and the Democrats get the pathological liars.
Not all in either party are such, of course, but psychopaths ARE vastly overrepresented in politics. But the non-psychopaths of each party tend to have personal ethics similar to the psychopaths - which is why the two different styles are attracted to the two parties.
This is not to say there aren't other problems than compulsive lying with a rule-bound compensated psychopath, of course. (For starters, if you don't play EXACTLY by HIS particular set of rules, you suddenly find yourself on his scumbag list. Expect to be treated like a crook, terrorist, or trator.)
Understanding this is key to understanding the politics of the two major parties. Their members really DO think and act differently. And the members and/or supporters of each tend to become very confused when they expect the other sides' people to act like their own.
Now that would be even way cooler than DeDRMS. Followed by DeRIAA, DeMPAA, and DeSCO.
I thought Linus already WROTE DeSCO.
It was easy to look at the nonsense going on in India with the government attempting to ban IP telephony [...]
That's the first I've heard of that. (And it's important to me.)
Do you have a pointer to any articles on it?
thanks
Are bullets taxed? im pretty sure bullets should have a heavey tax - say 150%? No? thought not, so dont tax the fucking internet you republican dick-head gun toting rednecks!
Last time I looked it was the Republicans that were trying to keep the taxes off the Internet (free market, create wealth, etc.) and the Democrats that were thirsting for another source of tax money.
= = = =
But of course the lefties are ALWAYS accusing their opposition of their own sins. It serves as a preemptive strike (so somebody who later points out the lefties' misbehavior looks like a "No, HE did it!" playground finger-pointer). And they place no value on honesty: Winning the argument with a lie is considered "intelligent" rather than "reprehensible". (I'd have said "dishonest" - but then lefties wouldn't understand that I meant something bad. B-) )
As for "Rednecks": Apparently, despite all their other rhetoric, lefites think racial and ethnic slurs are fair game if directed at the rural working class. (And I bet he either doesn't know or care that the term includes a reference to the assimilated indians and part-indians that form a significant component of it.)
Are we just talking about apps that mimic a telephone, or are we talking about all VoIP applications?
The sane thing to do would be to tax subscription VoIP/PSTN bridging. (PSTN = Public Switched Telephone Network.)
VoIP computer-to-computer connection is just another IP application. It lets you communicate with another computer user - but so does just about EVERY OTHER application on the Internet. (VoIP just happens to transmit voice, rather than the text streams of chat and IM, the compositions of email/blogs/web pages, the reference information of DNS, the "computer-as-person conversations" of telnet/rlogin/ssh, and so on.)
PSTN bridging creates a connection to the legacy telephone network, completing the emulation of the formaer service. You can use the "pay phone" model of outgoing calls only or the "customer line" model of a subscription that accepts PSTN calls to an assigned phone number. While it does have an Internet component, there's no question that it also has a PSTN component. It's also pretty clear that the PSTN component is the dominant functionality and the Internet component is just a new kind of "phone line" transport between the PSTN to the user.
So a logical thing to do would be to apply the tax to VoIP/PSTN bridging. This would leave pure IP applications untaxed, including computer-to-computer VoIP calls. And it would answer the fairness objections from the telephone companies.
= = = =
Alternatively, now might be a good time to review the tax structure on telephone service.
The tax to support the 911 service got hung on them as a convenient place to put it. The service was only available to telephone subscribers, so there was SOME fairness in that. But these days practically EVERYONE is a telephone subscriber, so fair allocation of the cost is not as much of an issue. And 911 is REALLY part of the dispatch functions of the emergency services (a convenience to replace fire/police callboxes and separate phone numbers for each service). It's not a necessary function of the telephone network. In fact, it's an expensive service provided BY the telephone network TO the emergency services. Shouldn't it be paid for out of the budgets of the services, rather than by a tax on phones (whose collection is ALSO a drain on the phone companies)?
Similarly, the rest of the taxes on phones are either related to specific telephone issues (funding regulatory boards, funds transfer between long-distance and local cariers related to the monopoly breakup, buying equipment for phone number portability) or yet another hidden government money grab on the consumer's pocket book for "public purposes" ("universal" and "lifeline" service subsidies, federal and local taxes). It's clearly appropriate to charge the phone-company specific fees to the phone company customers (and to VoIP/PSTN bridging customers SOLELY to the extent that they fund a function used by the bridgers as well). As for the rest: since the government isn't going to tax the Internet, it should take those taxes off the phone companies, too.
If the government wants to subsidize phone service for the poor, roll it into the welfare system (rather than soaking the other phone customers just because there's some mental resonance). If the government just wants to suck money out of the pockets of the citizens, lump it in with the other general taxes.
As for "universal service", why should the people in the cities pay for phones for people in the country? People in the cities moved there, and pay MUCH higher living costs, in order to be in closer communication with other people. If somebody in the boonies wants a wire strung 50 miles to get a benefit of city living in his lower-cost country location, let him pay for it. (Or get a cell phone and a cradle, and maybe a high-gain directional antenna, if he's within some services' coverage area.) There's no "Internet universal service" - and the government is trying to DEregulate local phone service and allow othe
Just have an encrypted "address card" sent upon connection.
Encryption doesn't give any security, since the DEcryption routine and key has to be present in every set of 911 support software in the country. Only a matter of time until that's compromised. (Not to mention that the need to keep it secret creates a barrier against authors of open-source 911 software authors.)
Better would be a "send address" function at the user's option. But that doesn't solve the problems with mobile and VPN users I mentioned previously.
So the address has to come from the network and the VoIP bridging service.
Getting it from the network carries risks of its own. In principle it could be accessed by governments and used to find the address of ANY connection, destroying anonymity. Imagine its use by a totalitarian government hunting down readers of "forbidden" information and contributors to a dissident blog.
As for the emergency calls, that's rather easy. Just have an encrypted "address card" sent upon connection. If not encrypted then at least signed.
And when you're using your laptop on the road and call 911, they should go to your home or office? No, I don't think so.
Ditto if you're at home but happen to be VPNing in to work - and the emergency services go to your work.
And then there's Joe Random User. Requiring him to set up an address as part of his internet install (or even his internet phone install) complicates the process. So many of them won't set it up. And others will set it up wrong - and not find out until they call for an ambulance and it doesn't come. And others will be suspicious that they're buying into a "caller ID" that might give out their ADDRESS to people they call. Or to people who call THEM. Even if it doesn't.
And it also puts your physical address on the machine in a well-known place. How long until some stalker cracks his target's machine and comes for her? Or the latest spammer worm carries an additional payload that creates a mailing address database for the spammer - LOTS of bucks in selling THAT one.
Sorry, I don't think that dog hunts.
For example, since the record would be printed after the vote is cast, there's no way to do anything about it if the printed vote isn't correct. They can't remove the vote from the machine, and they can't let the voter cast another vote.
Sure they can. (Remember: The tape is not staying in the machine. The voter is taking it to the ballot box.)
Here's one way:
- The voter registers his choice and says "print it".
- The printer spits out the choices on the tape - but doesn't spit the final part.
- The voter examines the tape while it's STILL ATTACHED TO THE MACHINE.
- If he likes it he presses "accept".
- The machine records the vote.
- The machine finishes the tape with an OK flag.
- The voter tears off the tape and takes it to the pollworker.
- If he DOESN'T like it he presses "retry" or "cancel - change machines".
- The machine discards the vote.
- The machine finishes the tape with a VOID flag.
- If he hit "retry" he goes back and fixes his vote. If he hit "cancel - change machines" the machine spits out the authorization card.
Here's another way:
- The machine records the vote on the smartcard. (If the smartcard memory is too small, it records an index of the vote and keeps the vote record in volatile memory. The machine can save 'em all or keep a cache of the last several.)
- If the voter likes his vote he returns the ballot and the smartcard. The ballot is put in the ballot box and the smartcard reauthorized for the next voter.
- If the voter DOESN'T like his vote he complains to the poll worker. The poll worker reauthorizes the smartcard with a "retry" status and puts the spoiled ballot in the discard box.
- The voter votes again, preferably on the same machine. (Necessarily to the same machine if the card's memory is too small.) The machine deducts the voter's previous vote then goes ahead as if starting a fresh session.
- At poll closing the machines discard any remaining per-voter memory.
Note that if the smartcard holds the vote and the voter goes to a different machine, there's the possibility that the machine could end up with a negative vote total. This is OK. (As a check the machines can also keep a total of the number of initial vote and revote sessions, and no tally on any machine should be more negative than the number of revotes or more positive than the total number of vote/revote sessions, just as the sum across all machines should be non-negative and no greater than the number of initial vote sessions.)
And there's no way to know that the vote recorded on the memory card is the same as the vote printed.
There's NEVER a way to "know" that. That's the WHOLE POINT of having an audit trail and making the PRINTED tape the official vote - so you can catch it if the total is wrong.
But if a half-step is all that some county can afford, at least they'll be able to have some basic capability to audit.
This proposal has EXACTLY the same characteristics as the open voting system, except for the ability to MECHANICALLY recount the ballot reciepts (and any issues related to the voters having to tear off the tape manually).
What they didn't expect is an effective, organized opposition (e.g. Groklaw) [...]
Which is a classic error for any corporation looking at any volunteer effort - to assume that, because the volunteers are not doing this for a living with a corporate infrastructure behind them, they are incapable of organized, sustained, intelligent, and effective effort.
They make this mistake when analyzing the software development and support efforts. But FOSS' track record is finally bringing the most perceptive of them to an understanding of the error. (It's also rubbing the noses of the most outperformed in this simple truth, as well.)
Now SCO has made the same mistake when it came to our abilities on the legal and PR fronts. They targeted IBM's teams (a mistake in itself, since IBM has a long history of defending against bogus IP claim terrorism). Then they found themselves fighting a hydra-headded monster, with major brainpower, skills, and persistence. (And with NOBODY who could declare a surrender and make it stick. B-) )
"I had heard that they do have provision for adding one of their own printers."
Supposedly they all have a printer inside them. This is because the HAVA law reuires that they print out a record of the votes. Strangely, they decided that it was sufficient to print a total when the polls close, and not a continuous record of votes cast, so there's no way to prove that the total printed is correct, and thus no value in printing it.
I just found Cringely's March 11 Column which also says that, and suggests replacing the locked cover with one with a slot and using that to print a reciept. Several other documents available on the web (such as Maryland's report on the system) mention this printer without describing it as clearly as Cringely does.
The printer in question is a "tape printer", printing on a roll of tape like that of a cash register reciept. (Likely it IS a cash register / ATM machine printer.) The roll, according to Cringely, is large enough to print reciepts for all the votes that might be cast on a single machine in a day of voting.
So (in advance of obtaining replacements with a slot for the locking cover) just unlock the cover and print voter reciepts on the tape, as an initial emergency measure for the next election. They'd be too floppy to machine-recount, but they'd be more than adequate for a hand recount.
There we have it: Yes, we COULD use the Diebold machines (or probably any other brands, since the printer is federally mandated) with the open source software and NO additional hardware (except eventually the cover-with-a-slot), obtaining the printed audit trail we want.
We could [run the software on Diebold machines], but it wouldn't do any good because the Diebold machines don't have page printers.
But do they have a serial or parallel port, or any kind of expansion connector for a printer? Even internally?
I had heard that they do have provision for adding one of their own printers. If the interface for that is standard one might come up with a cheap adapter to bring out a cable for an off-the-shelf printer, suitable for use with your software. (Unlike the machine itself, the printer interface doesn't have to be bulletproof because the voter checks the result.)
Also, according to one of the stories I've seen on them, at least some of them have a modem, to upload data after polls close. If that's standard, rather than an extra cost option present on only a few of the machines, it might be used to feed a printer - or a plain-paper fax machine!
One of the arguments against adopting this in some states is that they've already dumped a bunch of cash on proprietary systems, notably Diebold's.
But Diebods's system appears to be based on a hardware/OS platform that, at its core, is Wintel. No doubt the same is true for many, perhaps even all, of the others. (Even if they're not, Linux and the GNU toolset already has ports to many other processors/platforms, including essentially all commonly available current-generation processors.)
Perhaps it might be possible to port the Open Source voting software to the Diebold and/or other voting machines that have already been purchased?
The bulk of the machines you need are the ones in the booths. Plug an off-the-shelf printer into a Diebold and you're all set there. (No security issues on the printer itself, beyond making sure it's working.)
For the remainder, you only need one (plus maybe a spare) with a working OCR reader, sound card, and modem - for the blind readback and the uplink scan. Put that scanner on the exiting voting machine with the modem (as Diebold does on one of the machines for doing the final uplink to the state's database). Or put it on a cheap desktop, since the touchscreen is not necessary.
(Heck: Put the software for THAT machine on a bootable CD-ROM and you don't even need a special machine. Just borrow one from the school library for election day. Even if some BIOS-based malware managed to get activated and save the data, there's no confidentiality issues with what is on that machine. Any corruption of the data by malware would be detected in a manual recount, just like corruption in any other part of the total system.)
For future instalations you could go with generic touchscreen systems - or stick with the major vendors if their prices come down into the sanity range or if you want to pay a premium for ironclad hardware (like byers of "True Blue" PCs from IBM). The voting machine vendors could even make money as vendors of ruggedized commodity hardware if they don't have to maintain all that proprietary voting software.
[...] they were instructed to charge HIGH to add [print] capability, if it came to it.
I don't see this as (necessarily) a huge conspiracy to avoid an audit trail. This is likely a simple matter of Diebold achieving vendor lock-in with a limited feature set and then charging outrageous prices to add to that feature set.
Another non-conspiracy explanation: Printers have lots of moving parts and are highly subject to failure. That's especially true if they are used intermittently, with months of storage between uses. Now deploy thousands of them, with the entire corps of news media breathing down your neck over every glitch, and you have an enormous PR disaster in the making.
Given that other voting systems that have been in service for years (such as mechanical voting machines) leave no audit trail, they might have thought that the risks from the printers were far worse than the risks from bad PR over the lack of an audit trail.
That's doubly true because there are a LOT of places - not just the machines themselves - where the count might be corrupted, maliciously or through bugs. Without the trail such corruption wouldn't be detected, with the trail it almost certainly would, and would become big news. Build in a scandal-magnet and you need extra bucks to weather the resulting scandals and achieve the same risk-reward ratio.
But I, for one, am VERY glad to see the conspiracy theories circulate - and that they're naming Republicans. Because IMHO they're likely to lead to increased pressure (especially among Democrats, who otherwise could care less) to add the audit trail - and thus make elections even harder to rig than with the previous, non-electronic systems.
So much for ELUA terms to the effect of "You may make ONE archival copy."
If the medium fails in a couple years you need several. First, you need to make a string of them to "refresh" the data before the old disk fails. Second (since the failure is statistical) you need several copies to obtain the redundancy necessary to recover from any errors that occurred during storage. And you should also keep a previous generation, in case you need to recover from errors introduced during the copying process.
So you need a LOT more than "a SINGLE backup copy" to have an adequate backup. IMHO (IANAL) this makes such ELUA terms ludicrous, and a violation of your first-sale rights - another strike against the reasonableness of the portion of the DMCA that says such contracts are enforcible.
The paper you have in mind is "Distributed Ray Tracing" by Robert Cook, Thomas Porter, and Loren Carpenter,
Thanks for the reference.
(For those who don't want to follow the link and read the paper, the fifth item was translucency - which this approach models by using a probability function for whether the ray penetrates the surface, rather than splitting the ray into a pair of weighted rays and tracing them both - which rapidly explodes if you have several translucient surfaces in the image).
Distributed ray tracing isn't a "hack", though -- it's a fundamental principle of modern global-illumination rendering systems.
Yes, ray tracing is basic, as is Monte Carlo. Comgining them MIGHT be considered a hack, or straightforward synthesis. But that's not the breakthrough that I was referring to when I said "hack".
You need to remember the environment of the time.
This was twenty years ago - and compute power was twenty years farther back on the Moore's Law exponential. That's a LOT less bang for the buck. (Using the 1.5/year formulation you can do well over 8000 times as much computation now for the same dollar.)
Ray tracing was known to be "right". But it was also extremely compute intensive. So even basic ray tracing was considered dreadfully expensive. The bulk of the graphics research at the time was directed toward finding ways to get good rendering without incurring such a compute cost. Most of the work consisted of finding shortcuts, then patches to correct the artifacts of the shortcuts, then patches to correct the remaining artifacts of the shortcuts plus the previous patches.
Cook, Porter, and Carpenter bucked the trend and examined the combo of Ray Tracing with Monte Carlo, despite the multiplier over basic ray tracing. So far so good. And they found that Monet Carlo raytracing could do not one or two, but FIVE difficult "fuzzy" effects that were EACH considered difficult, producing images of breathtaking perfection. But that's STILL not what I called a "hack".
The breakthrough was recognizing that once you had incurred the small constant-factor cost over basic raytracing to achieve ONE of the effects, THE OTHER FOUR COULD BE HAD FOR FREE. THAT's the "hack".
Again consider the time. Look at the pictures in the Siggraph journal - where the best results of a dozen research projects might be published every month - with glitches, low resolution, visible triangles, and artifacts galore. Then comes this breathtaking shot of the billiard balls in action, with only its perfection to separate it from a high-resolution digitized photograph.
Over the next several years the combination of this algorithm with the explosion of computing power in the supercomputers of the time reduced video synthesis to a "solved problem".
Indeed, the explosion of supercomputer construction was largely driven by this very "killer app" - at one point well over half the Crays in existence had been ordered for entertainment and advertising video synthisis. (It was only later that the rampup of desktop power combined with this algorithm's parallizability that led to "render farms" of cheap, fast desktop workstations.)
Yes, it's a "fundamental principle of modern global-illumination rendering systems" - NOW. Put the emphasis on "modern". But (like the sealed-in-steel battery), at the time it was the brilliant breakthrough that, only after the fact, seems obvious.
[...] advanced rendering features: displacement, motion blur, raytracing, flexible shading and lighting, [...]
That sounds like an old Siggraph presentation I saw a decade or two ago when I used to go to Siggraph. Lucasfilm, I think. (The fine sample picture in the article showed a motion-blured image of a set of pool balls in motion.)
When rendering an image using raytracing, there are several effects that are achieved by similar over-rendering processes. I.e. you ray-trace several times varying a paramter:
- Depth-of-field (use different points on the iris of the "camera", blurring things at different distances from the "focal plane".)
- Diffuse shadows (use different points on the diffuse light source(s) when computing the illumination of a point.)
- Motion blur (use different positions for the objects and "camera", evenly {or randomly} distributed along their paths during the "exposure" - ideally pick the positions of the whole set of objects by picking several intermediate times, rather than picking the postion of each object separately, to avoid artifacts of improper position combinations.)
- Anti-aliased edges. (Pick different points in the pixel when computing whether you hit or missed the object or which color patch of its texture you hit.)
As I recall there were about five effects that worked similarly, but I don't recall the other(s?) just now.
To do any one of them requires rendering the frame N times {for some N} with the parameter varied, then averaging the frames. (Eight times might be typical.) Naively, to do them all would require N**5 renderings - 32,768 raytracings of the frame to do all five.
The insight was to realize that the effects could be computed SIMULTANEOUSLY. Pseudorandomly pick one of the N from each effect's set for each frame and only render N frames, rather than N**5. Eight is a LOT smaller than 32K. B-)
Sounds like Nvidia ported this hack to the firmware for their accellerator.
a much more important question is how this material will be extracted.
Given that cleaning up the exhaust from burning plant material is well understood, I wouldn't sweat it.
It'd be more concerned with the chemical processes that "mobilize" the contaminants. They're talking about reacting them so they become much more water soluble. That's great for getting them out of the ground quickly. But it has the downside that it enormously increases the contamination level of the ground water.
If any of that water with the "mobilized" heavy metals makes it into the local ground water it's a serious hazard.
Probably easy to deal with, though: If they inject the "mobilizing" compounds just outside the borders of the contaminated area and suck the water to be used on the plants from the center (or downstream side if there's a significant undergound flow) they should pretty much get it all and use it to water the plants. The plants will get all the metals (except maybe for some of the mercury which will escape as vapor). Corn, in particular, is VERY thirsty so little water will get past the plants - and that will go back into the wells to be sucked out again.
When the toxins are pretty much leached out (along with most of the trace minerals), turn off the mobilizing compounds, keep pumping until the water comes clean. Any traces remaining will no longer be mobile and the ground should be at least as good as random ground.
This approach should also be useful for cleaning up naturally mineral-containing soil which has been unsuitable for farming up to now.
Do you have to be caught, let off scott free, and then caught again before anything happens?
Nope. That's just the top of three tiers. Bottom is one year. Here they are:
Up to five years and/or a fine for:
- Furthering another felony using spam
- Second offense. (Voilating state anti-spam laws also counts as first offense.)
Up to three years and/or a fine for:
- using cracked computers to send the spam
- using email accounts or domain registrations obtained with false i.d. info to send the spam
- Sending LOTS of spam: >2,500/day (24 hour period), 25,000/month (30 day period), or 250,000/year (1 year period).
- causing one or more persons to lose $5,000 or more within a one-year period. (I think this includes conning, system damage, and spam cleanup costs.)
- Obtaining anything of value totalling $5,000 or more within a one year period as a reslut of spamming. (I think this includes getting paid to spam.)
- Bossing three or more underlings to do the spam.
Up to one year and/or a fine for any other violations.
Slightly separate issue:
If you contribute disks, rather than giving them a list of things for the library to acquire, they're very likely to make them available.
Commercial distributions are nice. But given that it's free software you could download and burn the disks yourself.
If you do provide homeburned disks, be sure to clearly mark the disks with what they contain (leaving space for a library marking, too) and provide a hardcopy of the license with each - preferably as a jewelcase insert - so the librarian can be confident that such copies are legit.
(Getting one of the CD labeling kits and printing up a pretty label will also make 'em look more professional, increasing the librarian comfort level.)
I believe the outcome of the SCO suit is likely to put most of this to rest.
But if that is settled (in the favor of the open-source side) and similar suits continue to appear, we have a problem - and may need to retaliate in order to fix it.
The problem is that, even with insurance, the threat of suits increases the cost of using Open Source - even when the code itself is free. Either you buy insurance (possibly for as much as the shelf price of a competitive product) or you risk even more if you're sued.
Assuming the victims of the frivolous suits can't recover more than their own costs, we're left in the position of free software becoming more expensive than proprietary.
I wonder if, should that scenario develop, one could similarly raise the price of proprietary software by similarly going after customers when a closed-source product is found to contain purloined open-source code?
Probably a bad idea, morally and/or tactically. But I'd like to hear others' thoughts on it.
Well, in the case of blind people, the visual system of their brain is taken over by their auditory system. They end up processing sound they way sight is usually processed, allowing them to "see" with whatever limited audio cues are given to them. It's amazing how adaptive the brain is.
Not completely surprising - since the human brain also does some echolocation (and other processing of sound redundancies and missing energy in particular bands into information about nearby objects).
Both systems involve communication between processed sensory information and a model of the surrounding space. This implies that they might have evolved from a common system, whcih might make it easier for the nerve cells able to retarget from one to the other if one is hampered by lack of input. (Alternatively, lack of input in one system and expanded use of the other might make the heavily-used system grow or recruit more untargeted cells.)
Regarding echolocation: Try it. Go into a quiet empty room - preferably an empty one with hard walls and not much soft furniture and curtains - and close your eyes. Make a clicking sound with your mouth - or walk in shoes that make a sharp sound when they hit the floor. You'll be able to "feel" the walls as you approach them, and get a sense of the size of the room. Sound reflecting or absorbing objects may also be noticable.
Of course blind people make more use of this system. There was one case of a blind kid who could ride a bicycle on quiet streets using it - making clicking sounds with his mouth as the illumination.
Won't they issue patents for perpetual motion machines?
As I understand it.
Early in the patent office's life they required working models for everything. They quickly acquired quite a collection and storing them got expensive. So they stopped requiring them. (Many of the ones they alread had are now exhibited at the Smithsonian - the "nation's attic". That's one way to unload the storage cost. B-) )
But there was this RASH of perpeutal motion machine patent attempts, which was making the office very busy for useless stuff. Given that the current model of physics said (and still does say) that a more-energy-out-than-in perpetual motion machine was impossible so they were a waste of time, they didn't want to bother. But their mandate was not to certify functionality, but just issue temporary monopolies for inventions. So they compromised by retaining (reinstituting?) the requirement to provide a working model if you claimed perpetual motion. This got most of 'em out of their hair.
They still miss from time to time. Sometimes a highly-efficient system get initially rejected as a perpetual motion machine. (For instance: A very efficient still combining a tower to create a partial vacuum to reduce heat of vaporization requirements with a counter-current heat-exchanger to recycle it. You still have to input the heat of solution plus some more for inefficiencies.) But you can easily reverse that by showing where you're putting the energy in. Other times they'll just miss that you're claiming more out than in, and issue the patent if the device is novel.
The designs in the patents this guy got claim an energy input, and it's not immediately clear that he's claiming energy gain. (Especially since he mentions extraction of energy from the magnets, which would not be perpetual motion because it wouldn't last - just like devices with included batteries.) So maybe they got through as novel motor designs because it wasn't clear he was claiming more than 100% efficiency.
More useless services from cellphone companies.
Like personalized ring tones and bust-your-thumbs instant messaging? B-)
They're TELEPHONE companies, dude!
They learned a long time ago that millions of customers dribbling in a buck here-and-there for "value added" services add up to BIG BUCKS! They COULD have provided this for free, as a convenient side-effect of the computers they used to cut the cost of their switching equipment. It's just a bunch of software hacks. But why give it away when they can CHARGE for it, and people are willing to PAY?
When will they get to lowering rates and giving cheap internet access? Hmm?
Cheap? Probably never. Or when they're going broke due to competition from other companies that ARE providing such a service cheaply. Even then they're probably price it at "all the traffic will bear" and count on their broad coverage to get them customers despite cheaper competition.
They WILL roll out non-cheap portable internet services - eventually. But don't hold your breath. Expect it to be folded into some other upgrade to their cell systems (like the upcoming move to QoS-enabled-IP based voice transport) rather than a standalone upgrade.
A high-powered 50 Mhz wide slot in the 3.6g band?
That's right BANG in the middle of channel 1 of the OFDM PHY proposal for IEEE 802.15 broadband wireless Personal Area Networks. (The proposed initial deployment was to use systems that cycle through bands 1 through 3 with each transmission.)
WUSB was also to be based on the OFDM proposal.
This should throw an extra monkeywrench into both of 'em. (Possibly more into the OFDM than the DS-CDMA version, though I'm not sure of that.)
= = = = = =
The OFDM and DS-CDMA factions couldn't agree on a standard. They DID agree on a "common signaling method" that both systems could talk with only tiny tweaks to the radios, and a protocol for time-dividing the slot, so if they both ended up depolyed they could take turns rather than stepping on each other (with lots of extra system numbers available for future systems to play, too).
Then they split up.
The DS-CDMA faction was ready with silicon, needing only any tiny tweaks resulting from the standardization process. IMHO The more populous OFDM faction is now trying to delay their deployment in various ways, most involving announcements of new products to delay adoption of the DS silicon.
One of those announcements was an "improvement" to the MAC layer (requiring the DS folk to delay deployment until they can get working OFDM silicon to test against or risk incompatibility). Another is the wireless USB announcement, based on the OFDM proposal, which might get system makers to hold off on adoption in the hope of getting something that plugs into the existing USB stack.
I wonder if this is the FCC saying "Use it or lose it!"?
But you can divide the bandwidth in the frequency domain instead of in the time domain, giving each client a continous bit stream but at a lower bitrate.
In that case you've still divided it - it's just a matter of how.
Using one big channel for your piconet and splitting it in time means you can divide it any way you want, and reconfigure the division on a message-by-message basis. Except for streaming applications, IP traffic is inherently "bursty" - so you can't predict what bandwidth each link will need in the next instant.
Dividing things up in the frequency domain means you have to reconfigure the radio links to adjust the bandwidth. This can cost you bandwidth for agreing to make the adjustment and time while things are settling. (Also - the radio is at the bottom of the comm stack while the info about traffic, to the extent there's any available beyond what's in the queues, is at the top - which may not be local.) And you can't participate in broadcasts - which means broadcast traffic gets replicated before transmition and chews up more bandwidth. You also have "receiver quieting" isuses, as another loud talker on a nearby frequency slice makes it hard for your receiver to pull the farther-away signal YOU want to hear out of the noise.
So you're far ahead to do your division in the time rather than the frequency domain, and save frequency domain splits for separating unrelated piconets.