As soon as your wife threw the application in the trash, she made it public knowledge.
You have got to be kidding. Although the only truly safe way of disposing of paper-base dinformation is to physically destroy the paper, I still count stuff thrown in the garbage as not-public. Especially anything I've placed in my own trash!
Then according to the US law you are not a "reasonable person". B-)
The FBI case referred to in a previous post in this thread basically said that a "reasonable person" has no expectation of privacy if they dump a document in the trash intact, but they do have such an expectation if they shred it - even if they use a simple shredder, rather than a crosscut, pulping the paper, or burning it.
This was significant in that case because it defines what the cops can use as evidence. If they can fish it out intact it's fair game. If they have to reassemble it, it's not. (I think they can use a reassembly if they had a warrant for whatever that particular piece contained before they collected it. But IANAL, and I only saw a media report of the decision in question.)
So by dumping it in the trash intact she made her information public. As you are doing every time you dump a document in your trash and set it on the curb for pickup.
Fine, so it's 'public knowledge'. As soon as someone else used that information and submitted it, I would consider that Identity Theft.
It's not identity theft until they claim to be her and run up a bill for her. If they just sent her a credit card and are waiting for her to run up a bill (and thus accept their contract), tough luck.
As to selling her information meanwhile - she threw it in the trash intact. If she'd shredded it or torn it up until the pieces were no longer readable without playing jigsaw-puzzle, she'd have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Since she put it in the trash intact, she gave her information to anybody who cares to recycle it, for whatever (legal) purposes they chose. Unless her jurisdiction has a specific opt-in requirement for spam email, tough luck.
"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
Combine them and you get:
"Godwin's law is very convenient for neo-NAZIs."
Because someone can be counted on to raise the Godwin red-herring whenever a neo-NAZI posts and is called on it. OR (as I HOPE is this case) when someone infected with one of the many nicey-nice seeming memes that the NAZIs ran into the ground repeats it, and the actual history and problems with the meme are ponted out. "Gun control" is one such meme.
The problem is that there are a LOT of ideas that sound nice at first. But when you actually try to implement them you get unintended consequences - often exactly the opposite of the effect you were trying to achieve. If you were trying to cause something good, you end up causing something bad. If it's not clear what is happening you may try to solve the increased problem by applying more of the poisoned medicine, in a positive-feedback loop.
Meanwhile, if the consequence YOU didn't intend is useful to those in control of the government and/or the media, they may encourage more of the "solution" - and suppress the evidence needed for you (and the rest of the population) to recognize the second-order effect that makes the "solution" the problem.
The NAZIs are a convenient history lesson, because they built their regime in this way on SEVERAL nice-sounding ideas - and ran them into the ground to the tune of millions dead.
One of the nice-sounding ideas is gun bans, and the Himmler quote that Clark paraphrased is one form of that meme. The nice-sounding meme: "Guns hurt and kill. Geting rid of guns will stop the hurting and killing. (Murder, robbery, rape, etc. will be reduced.)" But among the unintended consequences are a RISE in murder, robbery, rape, etc. - because guns defend more than they assault. And a far greater one is genocide - because privately-held guns are essentially the only defense against it once someone in power gets the idea into his head.
Of course the REAL meaning of Godwin's Law is that the mention of the NAZIs is a flag that the thread has diverted from its original topic into one of the stock debates. And indeed this has happened here.
But I maintain that, both in this thread and in general, the diversion occurs in the post BEFORE the NAZIs are mentioned. I maintain further that preventing the repeat of this piece of history (under some name other than NAZIs) is so important that it makes sense to nip these memes in the bud - with a single posting - whenever they resurface.
And finally I maintain that the misquoting of Godwin's Law in an attempt to suppress such history lessons by social pressure is another such meme, which is SO dangerous that it also rates a single - and much longer - followup.
I agree with General Clark: if you want assault weapons, join the Army -- they've got lot's of 'em.
General clark is paraphrasing Himmler (along with other NAZI sources).
"Germans who wish to use firearms should join the SS or the SA - ordinary citizens don't need guns, as their having guns doesn't
serve the State."
-- Heinrich Himmler
"All military type firearms are to be handed in immediately... The SS, SA and Stahlhelm give every respectable German man the opportunity of campaigning with them. Therefore anyone who does not belong to one of the above named organizations and who unjustifiably nevertheless keeps his weapon... must be regarded as an enemy of the national government."
-- SA Oberfuhrer of Bad Tolz, March, 1933
(Clark had to join the Democrats once he uttered his version. There's no longer a chance he could collect enough Republican primary votes to secure a presidential nomination.)
Three words to reply to your "Population density is key to broadband rollout":
CA NA DA
You mischaracterize my post.
I didn't say population density was key. I said it made it a lot cheaper. Which makes it a lot easier for South Korea.
Different countries, different technical issues, different regulatory issues, different financial issues. It just happens that South Korea has a VERY good technical/financial situation for broadband.
maybe now the most-technologically-advanced United States will catch up with third-world South Korea in broadband!!
South Korea has a much easier time rolling out broadband than the US.
In particular, something like 90% of the population lives in large apartment buildings in dense cities. LARGE apartment buildings. SO large that they each have a small telephone exchange in the basement.
Wiring all those apartments for broadband is a snap. For instance you can put a router in the basement, hook it into the SONET ring, and feed the phone lines with DSL. They're so short that getting 6 Mb to every apartment is a snap. (Or use two pair in the phone cable and send 'em Ethernet.)
In the US, on the other hand, you're dealing with a country that spans a continent from side to side and about a third of the way from top to bottom. Thousands of miles both ways. (It takes a week or so to drive across it.) On the average that takes a LOT of wire/cable/fiber to get everybody hooked up.
You'll notice that, like South Korea, the net (both narrow and broadband) is being rolled out mostly on existing copper: dialup, phone-pair DSL, and cable TV coax. (Exception is wireless, which also doesn't involve stringing something new to each house - just shine an antenna on it.)
But UNlike South Korea maybe half the population lives too far from the CO for even a 1.5 Mb downlink / puny uplink to work over phone pair.
The market has a solution for this. Buy Canon printers instead of Lexmarks. Canon lets you refill their cartridges, and they let other people sell compatible cartridges. Consequently, even genuine Canon cartridges are cheap.
Does anyone know how Epson printers compare to Cannon as an alternative to Lexmark?
(I don't think this is really off-topic since we've segued into tactics for making the invisible hand swat Lexmark. B-) )
The economic impact depends on what AB does with the extra 1% profit from Product I and what the licensor does with the 1% patent license fee for product II.
Like the zero-sum argument, that focuses on the minutae of the match and misses the bonfire.
The situation is actually more like this:
Company A has an invention. The invention reduces the cost both of making a widget and of operating it once it's made. Widgets are a very popular and useful. Several companies make different brands, models, and styles of them for different applications (and the companies specialize in different sytlyes and applications rather than all making all sorts and competing in all widget submarkets). Before the rollout of the invention the market is in equilibrium.
Company A can apply the invention to its new model of widget. The cost savings of the invention on manufacturing of the widget can be applied to increasing the profit margin and/or lowering the price and increasing the market share - both by gaining customers from competitors and from pricing widgets within reach of additional customers. The cost savings of operation accure to the customers - though the reduced cost can be used as a reason to raise the price of the widget somewhat.
But all these pricing strategies simply redistribute the economic benefits of the invention among various parties. The total economic benefit to the overall economy is the cost-saving per widget times the number of widgets, plus the cost savings of using a widget versus NOT using a widget times the number of additional widgets being used due to the price reduction.
So the more invention-enabled widgets in use, and the more widgets in use generally, the more the benefits to the economy.
Company A's widgets have 20% of the widget market, mostly in the widget-in-a-boat application. Company A COULD hold the invention closely, only letting it be used with ITS widgets, and try to take over more of the market - like by going into competition with B's widget-in-a-truck product. A has to invest a lot of money in this and will not capture a significant fraction of the widget-in-a-truck market before the technology moves on or the patent expires. The benefits to the overall economy is just that from the improvements to A's widgets and the extra widgets A sells.
Alternatively, A can go to B and say: "Look at this neat patent. I'll license it to you for use in trucks, cars, and vans. You pay me this fee that splits the manufacturing benefits 50/50 between us and price it any way you like for your customers."
A is happy: They get half the cost-savings from B's new improved widget plant.
B is happy: They get the other half of the benefits, and sell a lot more extra-cost-option widgets. And they don't have A getting into the car-truck-and-van business and snatching their customers.
B's customers are happy: They get cars, trucks, and vans with the new improved widget, which costs less to run and does a better job.
And the benefit to the total economy is the sum of the per-unit benefits of the improved widget times a MUCH larger number of widgets.
The patent license fee didn't do anything to the overall economic benefit - it just transferred part of the benefit of the use of the invention in manufacturing from B to A - in trade for letting A build improved widgets. But the LICENSING ITSELF enabled a MUCH LARGER number of widgets to go into service, much faster and in more applications. THAT is what created the additional benefit to the general economy.
Because Microsoft winning will completely destroy the "there's no one to sue if it breaks" argument against open source. B-)
And it will rub the PHBs' noses in the fact that Microsoftware is expensively buggy and that risk, which is practically impossible to insure against, comes straight off their bottom line.
Suppose that a "1 watt" solar cell can produce that 1 watt from 10am to 6pm each day (8 hours) in the average installation (unless you live in Pittsburgh or Seattle!:)
That's unreasonably high for anywhere. Average of 5 solar hours/day or greater only occurs in deserts int the continental US.
Here is a nice set of insolation maps (part of a fine FAQ on practical issues with alternative energy).
Also when calculating:
- Find P - the average power generation required (kwhr/day).
- Find C - the cost of the total system to produce power P.
- Find T - the lifetime of the total system.
- Find M - the monthly payment for a T year mortgage for C dollars.
Your cost per kwhr is (12/365.25)*M/P. When this is significantly less than power off the grid, solar has arrived.
If you're out in the boonies, one-time hookup costs for the grid will be large. Subtracting them from C before doing the M calculation ammortizes their costs over your the lifetime of your solar system - which is close to the result of ammortizing them over the life of the house.
If you're using battery storage don't forget to split the system into panels and batteries and do a separate mortgage calculation for the batteries (which have a much shorter life than the panels).
Take a student who has had no experience with the subject matter. You think this approach would still work well?
Yes - for many of them.
In my student days the lectures at most of my classes were WAY too sloooooooow for me. So I studied for other classes during lectures and switched attention when something new came up.
(Can't do that any more. Decades of programming have made me habitually focus so tightly that I can no longer multiplex between two text streams. I'll either get auditory exclusion and miss what is said, or find myself unable to read while someone is talking - especially if it's about something I'm NOT interested in.)
I'll have to try this speeded-up lecture recording trick. (I was a student BEFORE home computers, so pitch-adjusted sped-up speech wasn't available. The best was silence-clipped-out, and it was a laboratory hack rather than an available tool, though I understand the military had it available in some context.)
If the companies in question inform their customers in a timely manner this might further sink Bustamonte's chances in the recall / replacement election.
Regardless, I bet Cisco (and several other CA-based providers of VoIP gear) will have something to say about it.
You're talking about Ken Thompson's paper, "Reflections on Trusting Trust".
I don't believe this ever was a "famous hole in cc".
While I don't know if Ken (or someone else) ever actually DID install that bug in cc, I heard about it considerably before Ken's Turing Award lecture which you quote.
The version I heard claimed that the author of "strings" (on the BSD project, if I recall correctly) was trying it out against the various utilities that came with the early unix distribution he was working with. When he tried it on the various components of cc he noticed that one of the strings in the compiler was "login". He began to wonder WHY the c compiler should know that string and with a bit of work teased out the trojan horse / trapdoor combo in question.
Of course with a bit more difficulty one could write a similar hack where the strings to be inserted were encrypted in the binary and decrypted upon use, while the same was done with the target strings and/or a hash was used to identify them. This would be robust against detection by "strings" or similar utilities.
A law must be challenged in court to get it thrown out. Journalists working for large media corporations have the backing necessary to get this law overturned. The average citizen does not.
They also have the incentive to fight it - because it hits them where they live.
A journalist must protect his sources - because if he fails to do so even once, and it becomes known, his sources will dry up. (Without sources, all that's left for him in journalism is writing editorials.)
So professional journalists, regardless of their political leanings, will generally fight tooth-and-nail to avoid revealing the identity of their sources or content of their communications to the authorities. Occasionally this means going to jail - typically for contempt of court.
That the government was fool enough to activate the anti-journalistic-secrecy portions of the patriot act is encouraging - because it means that they are about to get a major test in court. That could mean they get struck down, putting the first major crack in the Patriot Act's edifice.
The idea was to enable developers to write for both Unix and Linux with a common Application Programming Interface (API) and common Application Binary Interface (ABI).
I thought that we already had that, and that it was called POSIX. Am I missing something here?
(In addition to POSIX not specifying an ABI, as has already mentioned in another post.)
Linux has a few deviations from the POSIX standard.
Some of them are accidental: Linus didn't want to shell out for the expensive POSIX document while a starving grad student hacking for his own enjoyment.
A very few are deliberate: For instance, there's at least one place where Linus thinks the POSIX standard is dangerously fouled up and needs to be done slightly differently.
The Gummint is not preemptively suppressing speech based on content or source, it is telling them to leave us the hell alone when they won't listen to us asking them to do that ourselves.
Unfortunately, the government DID make an error in crafting the law. They made an exception for charities, polls, and political campaigns.
By distinguishing those from commercial speech and refusing to protect you from them, they have suppressed some speech but not others based both on content AND source. The choice of classes is obviously politically motivated. And there is precedent that commercial and political speech are equally protected.
Now if the government HADN'T excepted political speech they would no doubt have run into other free-speech arguments for suppressing political speech. Similar (though less compelling) arguments might be made for suppressing polls or charities - and religious charities might make a freedom-of-religion argument as well.
The government MIGHT be able to get around this by operating separate don't-call lists for each of the classes, allowing the telephone user to make a separate choice for each one. That way your argument that they're just enforcing the stated will of the telephone user, rather than selectively suppressing speech based on content or source, would hold more water.
The picture in the article has to be misleading. Although a camera has adjacent color receptor sites, prin color doesn't work like that at all. [...] instead of being adjacent as in the picture, the cells would have to be stacked.
That is correct.
But this is a prototype. In the real product the cells would no doubt be stacked - with transparent ground planes between the color layers.
A version with adjacent single-color pixels is a lot easier to fabricate for a proof-of-concept device.
There would also need to be some way of ensuring that when the cells were partially colored, the upper colored areas were not directly over the ones below (or they would be obscured and only the top color would show.)
Nope. You're assuming opaque ink. Printing ink it translucient - absorbing its complimentary color and passing the others. Stack the inks to suck out different bands as required.
Exception is black - the "fourth color" which is present to make up for the fact that the other three dies aren't perfect when they're trying to suck out ALL the light. You have to take into account how the black overlaps the other colors, because the contribution of the other color inks is present only in the region NOT covered by the black ink.
IP means never having to innovate any more.
on
SCO's Plan Examined
·
· Score: 1
Beyond that... what happened to the idea that a company had to actually produce something or do something useful in order to make money? Lawsuits may have their place, but not in a business plan.
If IP is really "property", once you have some (from inventing it or buying it) a viable business plan consists of making money by licensing it.
Of course that means if somebody uses it without licensing it you have to sue him (or everybody will do it).
So the business plan is:
1) Buy some IP. 2) License it to everybody who will pay. 3) Sue everbody who uses it and won't pay (thus encouraging people to pay up in step 2 or collecting form them in step 3) 4) PROFIT!
The litigious nature of this society is drawing it into a very frightening pattern of litigating for profit.
If someone steals from you or hits you, you bring a court case against him. You do this for two reasons:
- To make hurting people and stealing things a net loss, so other people will be more likely to avoid doing such nasty stuff.
- To get back what was stolen from you.
If what was stolen from you was your profit, it's perfectly reasonable to sue to get it back.
This is, of course, what SCO is CLAIMING was stolen - their profit for licensing the code they claim rights over - which is why the courts will hear the case.
What happened to the idea that people must take responsibilty for their own actions?
Some people DON'T take responsibility for their actions. Courts determine whether they have acted irresponsibly and if so to force responsibility upon them.
Some people lose their property through the irresponsible actions of others (in the absense of irresponsibility on their own part) and may use the courts to try to recover it.
Of course one way to act irresponsibly and harm others is to bring bogus suits. The courts have SOME mechanism for handling this as well. But it's hard to prove, because you have to prove that the plantif knew he was wrong and brought the suit deliberately and maliciously. The courts do not want to discourage legitimate victims from seeking redress due to fear they'd be zorched if they were mistaken.
Could this be the start of a "my company is failing . . . I need to find someone to sue FAST!" campaign?
No. But only because that's been going on for a LONG time. B-(
I think "3. ????" is actually "Have Slashdot and the rest of the Linux media compulsively give you free publicity and credibility several times a day for months."
Notice that IBM doesn't feel compelled to publicize every exchange between SCO and Groklaw as if it's the discovery of life on Mars....
Last time I looked, Slashdot was a NEWS site, THE premier site for news about Linux and open source software, and the SCO suit is the biggest threat to Linux and open source software in its history.
Given that developments in that suit tend to occur daily or more often, don't you think it's appropriate for Slashdot to mention these developments as soon as they show up?
Meanwhile, IBM is NOT a news organization. It's the defendant in a potentially VERY expensive lawsuit that jepoardizes TWO of its top product lines.
Given that anything it says might be used against it in a court of law, crash its sales, or crash its stock price, don't you think it's appropriate for IBM to keep as quiet as possible?
Slashdot Mirror
As soon as your wife threw the application in the trash, she made it public knowledge.
You have got to be kidding. Although the only truly safe way of disposing of paper-base dinformation is to physically destroy the paper, I still count stuff thrown in the garbage as not-public. Especially anything I've placed in my own trash!
Then according to the US law you are not a "reasonable person". B-)
The FBI case referred to in a previous post in this thread basically said that a "reasonable person" has no expectation of privacy if they dump a document in the trash intact, but they do have such an expectation if they shred it - even if they use a simple shredder, rather than a crosscut, pulping the paper, or burning it.
This was significant in that case because it defines what the cops can use as evidence. If they can fish it out intact it's fair game. If they have to reassemble it, it's not. (I think they can use a reassembly if they had a warrant for whatever that particular piece contained before they collected it. But IANAL, and I only saw a media report of the decision in question.)
So by dumping it in the trash intact she made her information public. As you are doing every time you dump a document in your trash and set it on the curb for pickup.
Buy a shredder. They're cheap.
Fine, so it's 'public knowledge'. As soon as someone else used that information and submitted it, I would consider that Identity Theft.
It's not identity theft until they claim to be her and run up a bill for her. If they just sent her a credit card and are waiting for her to run up a bill (and thus accept their contract), tough luck.
As to selling her information meanwhile - she threw it in the trash intact. If she'd shredded it or torn it up until the pieces were no longer readable without playing jigsaw-puzzle, she'd have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Since she put it in the trash intact, she gave her information to anybody who cares to recycle it, for whatever (legal) purposes they chose. Unless her jurisdiction has a specific opt-in requirement for spam email, tough luck.
ever hear of Godwin's Law ?
Yep. But then there's Santayana's law:
"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."
Combine them and you get:
"Godwin's law is very convenient for neo-NAZIs."
Because someone can be counted on to raise the Godwin red-herring whenever a neo-NAZI posts and is called on it. OR (as I HOPE is this case) when someone infected with one of the many nicey-nice seeming memes that the NAZIs ran into the ground repeats it, and the actual history and problems with the meme are ponted out. "Gun control" is one such meme.
The problem is that there are a LOT of ideas that sound nice at first. But when you actually try to implement them you get unintended consequences - often exactly the opposite of the effect you were trying to achieve. If you were trying to cause something good, you end up causing something bad. If it's not clear what is happening you may try to solve the increased problem by applying more of the poisoned medicine, in a positive-feedback loop.
Meanwhile, if the consequence YOU didn't intend is useful to those in control of the government and/or the media, they may encourage more of the "solution" - and suppress the evidence needed for you (and the rest of the population) to recognize the second-order effect that makes the "solution" the problem.
The NAZIs are a convenient history lesson, because they built their regime in this way on SEVERAL nice-sounding ideas - and ran them into the ground to the tune of millions dead.
One of the nice-sounding ideas is gun bans, and the Himmler quote that Clark paraphrased is one form of that meme. The nice-sounding meme: "Guns hurt and kill. Geting rid of guns will stop the hurting and killing. (Murder, robbery, rape, etc. will be reduced.)" But among the unintended consequences are a RISE in murder, robbery, rape, etc. - because guns defend more than they assault. And a far greater one is genocide - because privately-held guns are essentially the only defense against it once someone in power gets the idea into his head.
Of course the REAL meaning of Godwin's Law is that the mention of the NAZIs is a flag that the thread has diverted from its original topic into one of the stock debates. And indeed this has happened here.
But I maintain that, both in this thread and in general, the diversion occurs in the post BEFORE the NAZIs are mentioned. I maintain further that preventing the repeat of this piece of history (under some name other than NAZIs) is so important that it makes sense to nip these memes in the bud - with a single posting - whenever they resurface.
And finally I maintain that the misquoting of Godwin's Law in an attempt to suppress such history lessons by social pressure is another such meme, which is SO dangerous that it also rates a single - and much longer - followup.
General clark is paraphrasing Himmler (along with other NAZI sources).
(Clark had to join the Democrats once he uttered his version. There's no longer a chance he could collect enough Republican primary votes to secure a presidential nomination.)
Three words to reply to your "Population density is key to broadband rollout":
CA NA DA
You mischaracterize my post.
I didn't say population density was key. I said it made it a lot cheaper. Which makes it a lot easier for South Korea.
Different countries, different technical issues, different regulatory issues, different financial issues. It just happens that South Korea has a VERY good technical/financial situation for broadband.
maybe now the most-technologically-advanced United States will catch up with third-world South Korea in broadband!!
South Korea has a much easier time rolling out broadband than the US.
In particular, something like 90% of the population lives in large apartment buildings in dense cities. LARGE apartment buildings. SO large that they each have a small telephone exchange in the basement.
Wiring all those apartments for broadband is a snap. For instance you can put a router in the basement, hook it into the SONET ring, and feed the phone lines with DSL. They're so short that getting 6 Mb to every apartment is a snap. (Or use two pair in the phone cable and send 'em Ethernet.)
In the US, on the other hand, you're dealing with a country that spans a continent from side to side and about a third of the way from top to bottom. Thousands of miles both ways. (It takes a week or so to drive across it.) On the average that takes a LOT of wire/cable/fiber to get everybody hooked up.
You'll notice that, like South Korea, the net (both narrow and broadband) is being rolled out mostly on existing copper: dialup, phone-pair DSL, and cable TV coax. (Exception is wireless, which also doesn't involve stringing something new to each house - just shine an antenna on it.)
But UNlike South Korea maybe half the population lives too far from the CO for even a 1.5 Mb downlink / puny uplink to work over phone pair.
The market has a solution for this. Buy Canon printers instead of Lexmarks. Canon lets you refill their cartridges, and they let other people sell compatible cartridges. Consequently, even genuine Canon cartridges are cheap.
Does anyone know how Epson printers compare to Cannon as an alternative to Lexmark?
(I don't think this is really off-topic since we've segued into tactics for making the invisible hand swat Lexmark. B-) )
The economic impact depends on what AB does with the extra 1% profit from Product I and what the licensor does with the 1% patent license fee for product II.
Like the zero-sum argument, that focuses on the minutae of the match and misses the bonfire.
The situation is actually more like this:
Company A has an invention. The invention reduces the cost both of making a widget and of operating it once it's made. Widgets are a very popular and useful. Several companies make different brands, models, and styles of them for different applications (and the companies specialize in different sytlyes and applications rather than all making all sorts and competing in all widget submarkets). Before the rollout of the invention the market is in equilibrium.
Company A can apply the invention to its new model of widget. The cost savings of the invention on manufacturing of the widget can be applied to increasing the profit margin and/or lowering the price and increasing the market share - both by gaining customers from competitors and from pricing widgets within reach of additional customers. The cost savings of operation accure to the customers - though the reduced cost can be used as a reason to raise the price of the widget somewhat.
But all these pricing strategies simply redistribute the economic benefits of the invention among various parties. The total economic benefit to the overall economy is the cost-saving per widget times the number of widgets, plus the cost savings of using a widget versus NOT using a widget times the number of additional widgets being used due to the price reduction.
So the more invention-enabled widgets in use, and the more widgets in use generally, the more the benefits to the economy.
Company A's widgets have 20% of the widget market, mostly in the widget-in-a-boat application. Company A COULD hold the invention closely, only letting it be used with ITS widgets, and try to take over more of the market - like by going into competition with B's widget-in-a-truck product. A has to invest a lot of money in this and will not capture a significant fraction of the widget-in-a-truck market before the technology moves on or the patent expires. The benefits to the overall economy is just that from the improvements to A's widgets and the extra widgets A sells.
Alternatively, A can go to B and say: "Look at this neat patent. I'll license it to you for use in trucks, cars, and vans. You pay me this fee that splits the manufacturing benefits 50/50 between us and price it any way you like for your customers."
A is happy: They get half the cost-savings from B's new improved widget plant.
B is happy: They get the other half of the benefits, and sell a lot more extra-cost-option widgets. And they don't have A getting into the car-truck-and-van business and snatching their customers.
B's customers are happy: They get cars, trucks, and vans with the new improved widget, which costs less to run and does a better job.
And the benefit to the total economy is the sum of the per-unit benefits of the improved widget times a MUCH larger number of widgets.
The patent license fee didn't do anything to the overall economic benefit - it just transferred part of the benefit of the use of the invention in manufacturing from B to A - in trade for letting A build improved widgets. But the LICENSING ITSELF enabled a MUCH LARGER number of widgets to go into service, much faster and in more applications. THAT is what created the additional benefit to the general economy.
I want to see them win this suit.
Why?
Because Microsoft winning will completely destroy the "there's no one to sue if it breaks" argument against open source. B-)
And it will rub the PHBs' noses in the fact that Microsoftware is expensively buggy and that risk, which is practically impossible to insure against, comes straight off their bottom line.
Suppose that a "1 watt" solar cell can produce that 1 watt from 10am to 6pm each day (8 hours) in the average installation (unless you live in Pittsburgh or Seattle! :)
That's unreasonably high for anywhere. Average of 5 solar hours/day or greater only occurs in deserts int the continental US.
Here is a nice set of insolation maps (part of a fine FAQ on practical issues with alternative energy).
Also when calculating:
- Find P - the average power generation required (kwhr/day).
- Find C - the cost of the total system to produce power P.
- Find T - the lifetime of the total system.
- Find M - the monthly payment for a T year mortgage for C dollars.
Your cost per kwhr is (12/365.25)*M/P. When this is significantly less than power off the grid, solar has arrived.
If you're out in the boonies, one-time hookup costs for the grid will be large. Subtracting them from C before doing the M calculation ammortizes their costs over your the lifetime of your solar system - which is close to the result of ammortizing them over the life of the house.
If you're using battery storage don't forget to split the system into panels and batteries and do a separate mortgage calculation for the batteries (which have a much shorter life than the panels).
Take a student who has had no experience with the subject matter. You think this approach would still work well?
Yes - for many of them.
In my student days the lectures at most of my classes were WAY too sloooooooow for me. So I studied for other classes during lectures and switched attention when something new came up.
(Can't do that any more. Decades of programming have made me habitually focus so tightly that I can no longer multiplex between two text streams. I'll either get auditory exclusion and miss what is said, or find myself unable to read while someone is talking - especially if it's about something I'm NOT interested in.)
I'll have to try this speeded-up lecture recording trick. (I was a student BEFORE home computers, so pitch-adjusted sped-up speech wasn't available. The best was silence-clipped-out, and it was a laboratory hack rather than an available tool, though I understand the military had it available in some context.)
If the companies in question inform their customers in a timely manner this might further sink Bustamonte's chances in the recall / replacement election.
Regardless, I bet Cisco (and several other CA-based providers of VoIP gear) will have something to say about it.
You're talking about Ken Thompson's paper, "Reflections on Trusting Trust".
I don't believe this ever was a "famous hole in cc".
While I don't know if Ken (or someone else) ever actually DID install that bug in cc, I heard about it considerably before Ken's Turing Award lecture which you quote.
The version I heard claimed that the author of "strings" (on the BSD project, if I recall correctly) was trying it out against the various utilities that came with the early unix distribution he was working with. When he tried it on the various components of cc he noticed that one of the strings in the compiler was "login". He began to wonder WHY the c compiler should know that string and with a bit of work teased out the trojan horse / trapdoor combo in question.
Of course with a bit more difficulty one could write a similar hack where the strings to be inserted were encrypted in the binary and decrypted upon use, while the same was done with the target strings and/or a hash was used to identify them. This would be robust against detection by "strings" or similar utilities.
> Why on earth would looking at Windows source code help with a Chinese version of Linux?
Maybe they can finally write an ntfs driver that can write reliably. (v)fat is dying
They'd BETTER not port Microsoft internals into Linux - or the rest of us better not accept their additions.
If you think the SCO suit is bad, imagine Microsoft suing - when they were RIGHT about having their IP lifted and would likely WIN.
A law must be challenged in court to get it thrown out. Journalists working for large media corporations have the backing necessary to get this law overturned. The average citizen does not.
They also have the incentive to fight it - because it hits them where they live.
A journalist must protect his sources - because if he fails to do so even once, and it becomes known, his sources will dry up. (Without sources, all that's left for him in journalism is writing editorials.)
So professional journalists, regardless of their political leanings, will generally fight tooth-and-nail to avoid revealing the identity of their sources or content of their communications to the authorities. Occasionally this means going to jail - typically for contempt of court.
That the government was fool enough to activate the anti-journalistic-secrecy portions of the patriot act is encouraging - because it means that they are about to get a major test in court. That could mean they get struck down, putting the first major crack in the Patriot Act's edifice.
The idea was to enable developers to write for both Unix and Linux with a common Application Programming Interface (API) and common Application Binary Interface (ABI).
I thought that we already had that, and that it was called POSIX. Am I missing something here?
(In addition to POSIX not specifying an ABI, as has already mentioned in another post.)
Linux has a few deviations from the POSIX standard.
Some of them are accidental: Linus didn't want to shell out for the expensive POSIX document while a starving grad student hacking for his own enjoyment.
A very few are deliberate: For instance, there's at least one place where Linus thinks the POSIX standard is dangerously fouled up and needs to be done slightly differently.
And there may be other classes of differences.
The Gummint is not preemptively suppressing speech based on content or source, it is telling them to leave us the hell alone when they won't listen to us asking them to do that ourselves.
Unfortunately, the government DID make an error in crafting the law. They made an exception for charities, polls, and political campaigns.
By distinguishing those from commercial speech and refusing to protect you from them, they have suppressed some speech but not others based both on content AND source. The choice of classes is obviously politically motivated. And there is precedent that commercial and political speech are equally protected.
Now if the government HADN'T excepted political speech they would no doubt have run into other free-speech arguments for suppressing political speech. Similar (though less compelling) arguments might be made for suppressing polls or charities - and religious charities might make a freedom-of-religion argument as well.
The government MIGHT be able to get around this by operating separate don't-call lists for each of the classes, allowing the telephone user to make a separate choice for each one. That way your argument that they're just enforcing the stated will of the telephone user, rather than selectively suppressing speech based on content or source, would hold more water.
If you haven't already complained about SCO's conduct to the Federal Trade Commission and/or Better Business Bureau, you really should do so.
The SEC would be more appropriate. This story looks like a smoking gun for securities fraud.
The picture in the article has to be misleading. Although a camera has adjacent color receptor sites, prin color doesn't work like that at all. [...] instead of being adjacent as in the picture, the cells would have to be stacked.
That is correct.
But this is a prototype. In the real product the cells would no doubt be stacked - with transparent ground planes between the color layers.
A version with adjacent single-color pixels is a lot easier to fabricate for a proof-of-concept device.
There would also need to be some way of ensuring that when the cells were partially colored, the upper colored areas were not directly over the ones below (or they would be obscured and only the top color would show.)
Nope. You're assuming opaque ink. Printing ink it translucient - absorbing its complimentary color and passing the others. Stack the inks to suck out different bands as required.
Exception is black - the "fourth color" which is present to make up for the fact that the other three dies aren't perfect when they're trying to suck out ALL the light. You have to take into account how the black overlaps the other colors, because the contribution of the other color inks is present only in the region NOT covered by the black ink.
Beyond that... what happened to the idea that a company had to actually produce something or do something useful in order to make money? Lawsuits may have their place, but not in a business plan.
If IP is really "property", once you have some (from inventing it or buying it) a viable business plan consists of making money by licensing it.
Of course that means if somebody uses it without licensing it you have to sue him (or everybody will do it).
So the business plan is:
1) Buy some IP.
2) License it to everybody who will pay.
3) Sue everbody who uses it and won't pay (thus encouraging people to pay up in step 2 or collecting form them in step 3)
4) PROFIT!
There's a lot of that going around:
- SCO
- RIAA
- MPAA
to name just three. B-(
My name is Sue and I am not happy, you insensitive clod.
My name is Sue.
How do you do?
Now you're gonna die!
The litigious nature of this society is drawing it into a very frightening pattern of litigating for profit.
If someone steals from you or hits you, you bring a court case against him. You do this for two reasons:
- To make hurting people and stealing things a net loss, so other people will be more likely to avoid doing such nasty stuff.
- To get back what was stolen from you.
If what was stolen from you was your profit, it's perfectly reasonable to sue to get it back.
This is, of course, what SCO is CLAIMING was stolen - their profit for licensing the code they claim rights over - which is why the courts will hear the case.
What happened to the idea that people must take responsibilty for their own actions?
Some people DON'T take responsibility for their actions. Courts determine whether they have acted irresponsibly and if so to force responsibility upon them.
Some people lose their property through the irresponsible actions of others (in the absense of irresponsibility on their own part) and may use the courts to try to recover it.
Of course one way to act irresponsibly and harm others is to bring bogus suits. The courts have SOME mechanism for handling this as well. But it's hard to prove, because you have to prove that the plantif knew he was wrong and brought the suit deliberately and maliciously. The courts do not want to discourage legitimate victims from seeking redress due to fear they'd be zorched if they were mistaken.
Could this be the start of a "my company is failing . . . I need to find someone to sue FAST!" campaign?
No. But only because that's been going on for a LONG time. B-(
Therefore Linux is not only safe, it's safe.
I take it you mean:
Therefore Linux is not only safe as in not poison, it's also safe as in not bathwater.
I think "3. ????" is actually "Have Slashdot and the rest of the Linux media compulsively give you free publicity and credibility several times a day for months."
Notice that IBM doesn't feel compelled to publicize every exchange between SCO and Groklaw as if it's the discovery of life on Mars....
Last time I looked, Slashdot was a NEWS site, THE premier site for news about Linux and open source software, and the SCO suit is the biggest threat to Linux and open source software in its history.
Given that developments in that suit tend to occur daily or more often, don't you think it's appropriate for Slashdot to mention these developments as soon as they show up?
Meanwhile, IBM is NOT a news organization. It's the defendant in a potentially VERY expensive lawsuit that jepoardizes TWO of its top product lines.
Given that anything it says might be used against it in a court of law, crash its sales, or crash its stock price, don't you think it's appropriate for IBM to keep as quiet as possible?
... you need to read up on the news a little more.
Would you care to elaborate?