But they're not compatible with the fax machines that anyone else has, which makes them largely irrelevant. If you're going to break compatibility, then just use encrypted email, which doesn't require new hardware at both ends and can increase the key length with a simple software modification.
I'd love to use ZFS but a) I'd have to work with Oracle
Or you can use FreeBSD, which has supported L2ARC since 7.4. The point of something like ZFS is that it allows you to use commodity hardware, but iX Systems will happily sell you FreeBSD-based ZFS storage up to 540TB. They fund most of the development of FreeNAS and use it as the basis for their storage systems.
No, just do zpool add {pool} cache {device} and it will use that device as a layer-2 cache. It's worked since FreeBSD 7.4, and earlier in Solaris. Oh, you said Linux? Sorry. I'll let you get back to using your hammer to insert screws.
OS X 10.7 actually comes with this functionality. You take a photograph of your signature with the built-in camera and it will then let you paste it onto PDFs. I'd been doing the same thing for ages. My signature is always identical, because it's always a scan of the same one. This means that there is zero difference between a valid and a forged version of my signature.
In pretty much all cases, the signature is completely irrelevant. The fact that I accepted the money and delivered the work is strong evidence that I accepted the contract. The fact that the other party accepted the work and delivered the money is strong evidence that they accepted the contract.
There's a lot of misunderstanding of the law with regard to contracts. A signature does not make a contract legally binding. The fact that both parties agreed to it makes it binding. A signature is evidence of this agreement. As is a witnessed verbal agreement, carved initials on a tree, a cryptographic signature, and so on. Common law gives a lot of precedent to written signatures, so they're considered to be quite strong evidence, but they don't magically make a document binding. They just make it more effort to dispute in court.
Try sending a fax between the EU and USA (in either direction) and see what your phone bill is like.
ubiquitous
They were in the '90s. They're a lot less common now. Most small businesses don't have one, unless they were around in the '90s.
and if you really don't want the physical device you can plug an old 33.6 modem into the serial port of any Linux server
And what do I plug the other end into? A lot of people now are using mobile phones exclusively and don't have a landline. I only know a couple of people under 35 who have a landline. Small businesses are using SIP rather than a landline, because it's cheaper and easy to get enterprise-level features for a tiny cost. Big businesses have been using SIP internally for ages and are starting to use SIP on the outside too, since it lets them trivially add more external lines (just add more bandwidth), connect their sites internal phone networks together, and so on.
you complain about anything like centralized medical databases
Not sure about the USA, but in the UK we complain about this because the government has been trying to implement it for the last 40 years[1] and, after spending vast amounts of money, has still failed. We'd rather have a cheap system that solves part of the problem than an expensive solution that's never actually delivered.
[1] There is even a Yes Minister episode, from 1982, about how ludicrously delayed it was.
Fax is ludicrously insecure. It sends the data entirely unencrypted. If you're in a country with a modern telecoms infrastructure then you're sending the data over a packet-switched network with a potentially huge number of intermediaries (the MoD downgraded the security of telephones a few years ago when BT rolled out their IP backbone, because they can no longer guarantee that UK to UK phone calls won't be routed through another country - oddly, no one mentions this when talking about the NSA only wiretapping calls that leave the country in the USA). Even without that, it's trivial to clamp something over the phone line at either end and intercept every single fax. To do that with email, you'd need to compromise the corporate mail server.
You don't know how many servers your email passes through or what they do with it, and you can't guarantee the receiver is protecting the information
You send it to your mail server. Your mail server sends it to their mail server. Both of these connections should default to encrypted. After that, sure, it's their responsibility to ensure that it's secure, but it is with fax as well. You can't guarantee that they shred the fax after reading it and aren't leaving sensitive commercial information in the rubbish. You can't guarantee that they won't make photocopies.
Worse, you can't guarantee that the receiving fax machine actually is a fax machine. These days, most big companies use fax to email gateways for fax. When they send a fax, they email it to a specific address. When they receive a fax, it's encapsulated in a PDF and emailed to the recipient. This means that the only difference between sending a fax and an email is the transport used between the two mail servers. In one case, it's an unencrypted, slow, easy-to-intercept analogue connection. In the other, you're sending it encrypted over the Internet.
What counts as binding for a contract is defined by common law as well as statute. It used to be that only a wax seal was valid for contracts. For a contract to be binding, both parties must have agreed to it. A signature does not make the contact binding, it presents evidence that both parties agreed. It's still possible that the signature was forged.
My (US) publisher accepts a scan of my signature on a PDF. Weirdly, they don't accept a strong cryptographic signature (which is actually hard to forge). I recently did some work for an organisation that wouldn't accept the PDF, but would if I printed off a copy and posted it to them. It seems crazy that printing it on my printer makes it legally binding, but printing it on theirs doesn't, and a court would agree.
That's starting to change, although the complexity of the software is more on the control theory side than on the software engineering side, so anything that offers control theory modules would be a good idea. Computer science usually doesn't, but EE should.
Not necessarily. Pools can also use UV or oxygen to kill bacteria. Being non-chlorinated doesn't mean not using anything to kill bacteria, it just means not using something that's also pretty hostile to humans. Chlorine isn't the best way of killing bacteria in pools, it's just the cheapest.
Note: This post in no way endorses the trolling of Dr Bob.
You can combine it with a rotating mirror and a DLP and make monochrome pictures on a wall a long way away? You can fire it at a spinning screen and make Star Wars Holonet-style images?
Here in the UK I don't think we even have Saturday delivery from the Royal Mail..
We do. Most post boxes are also emptied on Saturdays, although typically only one collection rather than the two or more that you get midweek. I quite often get rented DVDs arrive on a Saturday after returning one on a Thursday (new one shipped on Friday, arrives Saturday).
Well, in the specific case of this patent, there are quite a few things covered. For example, the plug that can be inserted in either orientation, and the way in which the device controls the charger. In fact, the real problem with this patent is how specific it is. You could very easily make a power connector that solves the same problems as Apple's MagSafe connector but didn't violate the patent. What you can't do, is produce one that's identical. This means that the patent can only be used to prevent interoperability. It can't be used to encourage people to license Apple's design because any other company could produce their own magnetic connector with a different pin-out for less than Apple would charge for a license. It can be used by Apple to restrict who can make charger products and devices that use Apple's chargers.
Patent treaties don't usually make patents valid abroad automatically, they prevent patenting in one locale from counting as prior disclosure. The point of allowing patents is to encourage disclosure. For this reason, most countries do not allow you to patent something that you have previously disclosed (society gains nothing from it - the invention is already public). This makes getting a patent in two countries impossible - if you filed a patent in France, for example, then you've already disclosed the invention before you try to file in Germany (these days, you can get a European patent and it's valid in several countries, but not between the USA and the EU, for example). This would mean that you couldn't get a patent in Germany. Patent treaties give you some leeway, typically one year, between filing for a patent in one signatory and in another.
Can actually be annotated and highlighted by writing directly on it with a stylus (though the cool kids call them pencils) - and the annotations can be removed using an eraser;
You can do this with my iRex iLiad. The annotations are stored as PNGs, one per page, and there's software for merging them with the PDF (if your handwriting is better than mine then you can run them through handwriting recognition and have the annotations indexed as well). iRex no longer exists - not surprising, they made great hardware but their software sucked - but iRiver (what's with all of these iCompanies) makes a device with similar capabilities: their Cover Story.
No. 25 million light years is a long way. To put it in perspective, that's 250 times the diameter of our galaxy. The fact that you need a telescope to spot it should give you a clue - it's spewing out vast amounts of radiation (or, it was, 25 million years ago), of which visible light is just part, but it's still barely visible with the naked eye. Even if it was emitting 1,000 times as much gamma radiation as visible light, it would be a negligible amount.
commercial I saw during one of the Sunday morning news shows today, British Petroleum
To be fair, if you're watching commercials from 1998 or earlier and expecting them to give you information about the world of today, then you're probably doing something wrong...
That's disingenuous. Also before the iPad were things like the Nokia N700 (Maemo) and the SmartQ series (Ubuntu/Wince/Android). The SmartQ devices, in particular, look a lot like the Samsung design, yet predate the iPad by years.
Are you disabled or something? Typing is at best 10 times faster than hand-writing.
Only one order of magnitude? Definitely not worth it then...
Plus hand-writing actually gives you time to think about what you're about to write
Nonsense. You spend more time on the mechanics of writing, meaning that you have less time for thinking. I can type a sentence, pause, think, then type the next one, and still be faster than if I were writing by hand without any breaks.
and is more flexible in terms of special characters or layouts (math with a keyboard is/way/ slower than by hand)
Depends on the input method. I can type equations in TeX markup about as fast as I can write them, and the results of the typed form are beautiful, while the results of the handwritten version are just about readable. I can write a natural deduction proof on paper faster than on a computer, but I've never had to do that since university - now I'd be more likely to use an automated / assisted theorem prover where I need to type in fragments and then give it some hints about the steps to try. So, while it's faster to write out by hand, it isn't faster to do the work that writing is a small part of by hand.
Seconded. Great book. Quite a few of the things that it complains about are now obsolete (for example, the main complaint levelled at X11 is due to vendors supporting different sets of extensions, but this is largely irrelevant now that everyone uses the same X server without large sets of proprietary patches). Many of the other points are spot on. The ioctl() system call should have been the point at which they saw that the file is the wrong abstraction for most things.
Really? Tanenbaum is pretty specialised - certainly worth reading, but not sure it's in the most influential. The MINIX book is way too heavy on source code and light on general theory, although Modern Operating Systems is a lot better. If you want something with the detail of the MINIX book, read either Amit Singh's OS X book (which also has a lot of detail about processor architecture) or one of Kirk McCusick's BSD books.
The Knuth series teaches algorithms, but does it badly. It's also light on the general theory. If you want to understand the theoretical side, start with Church and Turing, take a side track into Gödel, and then visit Dijkstra. Skip Knuth entirely. If you want something more in the practical side, read some of Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls' papers from PARC.
Slashdot Mirror
But they're not compatible with the fax machines that anyone else has, which makes them largely irrelevant. If you're going to break compatibility, then just use encrypted email, which doesn't require new hardware at both ends and can increase the key length with a simple software modification.
I think the company was Pixy? Pixel? Something like that - they've not been in the news recently because Disney bought them.
I'd love to use ZFS but a) I'd have to work with Oracle
Or you can use FreeBSD, which has supported L2ARC since 7.4. The point of something like ZFS is that it allows you to use commodity hardware, but iX Systems will happily sell you FreeBSD-based ZFS storage up to 540TB. They fund most of the development of FreeNAS and use it as the basis for their storage systems.
No, just do zpool add {pool} cache {device} and it will use that device as a layer-2 cache. It's worked since FreeBSD 7.4, and earlier in Solaris. Oh, you said Linux? Sorry. I'll let you get back to using your hammer to insert screws.
OS X 10.7 actually comes with this functionality. You take a photograph of your signature with the built-in camera and it will then let you paste it onto PDFs. I'd been doing the same thing for ages. My signature is always identical, because it's always a scan of the same one. This means that there is zero difference between a valid and a forged version of my signature.
In pretty much all cases, the signature is completely irrelevant. The fact that I accepted the money and delivered the work is strong evidence that I accepted the contract. The fact that the other party accepted the work and delivered the money is strong evidence that they accepted the contract.
There's a lot of misunderstanding of the law with regard to contracts. A signature does not make a contract legally binding. The fact that both parties agreed to it makes it binding. A signature is evidence of this agreement. As is a witnessed verbal agreement, carved initials on a tree, a cryptographic signature, and so on. Common law gives a lot of precedent to written signatures, so they're considered to be quite strong evidence, but they don't magically make a document binding. They just make it more effort to dispute in court.
Faxes are cheap
Try sending a fax between the EU and USA (in either direction) and see what your phone bill is like.
ubiquitous
They were in the '90s. They're a lot less common now. Most small businesses don't have one, unless they were around in the '90s.
and if you really don't want the physical device you can plug an old 33.6 modem into the serial port of any Linux server
And what do I plug the other end into? A lot of people now are using mobile phones exclusively and don't have a landline. I only know a couple of people under 35 who have a landline. Small businesses are using SIP rather than a landline, because it's cheaper and easy to get enterprise-level features for a tiny cost. Big businesses have been using SIP internally for ages and are starting to use SIP on the outside too, since it lets them trivially add more external lines (just add more bandwidth), connect their sites internal phone networks together, and so on.
you complain about anything like centralized medical databases
Not sure about the USA, but in the UK we complain about this because the government has been trying to implement it for the last 40 years[1] and, after spending vast amounts of money, has still failed. We'd rather have a cheap system that solves part of the problem than an expensive solution that's never actually delivered.
[1] There is even a Yes Minister episode, from 1982, about how ludicrously delayed it was.
You don't know how many servers your email passes through or what they do with it, and you can't guarantee the receiver is protecting the information
You send it to your mail server. Your mail server sends it to their mail server. Both of these connections should default to encrypted. After that, sure, it's their responsibility to ensure that it's secure, but it is with fax as well. You can't guarantee that they shred the fax after reading it and aren't leaving sensitive commercial information in the rubbish. You can't guarantee that they won't make photocopies.
Worse, you can't guarantee that the receiving fax machine actually is a fax machine. These days, most big companies use fax to email gateways for fax. When they send a fax, they email it to a specific address. When they receive a fax, it's encapsulated in a PDF and emailed to the recipient. This means that the only difference between sending a fax and an email is the transport used between the two mail servers. In one case, it's an unencrypted, slow, easy-to-intercept analogue connection. In the other, you're sending it encrypted over the Internet.
What counts as binding for a contract is defined by common law as well as statute. It used to be that only a wax seal was valid for contracts. For a contract to be binding, both parties must have agreed to it. A signature does not make the contact binding, it presents evidence that both parties agreed. It's still possible that the signature was forged.
My (US) publisher accepts a scan of my signature on a PDF. Weirdly, they don't accept a strong cryptographic signature (which is actually hard to forge). I recently did some work for an organisation that wouldn't accept the PDF, but would if I printed off a copy and posted it to them. It seems crazy that printing it on my printer makes it legally binding, but printing it on theirs doesn't, and a court would agree.
That's starting to change, although the complexity of the software is more on the control theory side than on the software engineering side, so anything that offers control theory modules would be a good idea. Computer science usually doesn't, but EE should.
Since this is the pedantry thread, I think you actually mean omniscient.
Non-chlorinated pools are also bacteria farms
Not necessarily. Pools can also use UV or oxygen to kill bacteria. Being non-chlorinated doesn't mean not using anything to kill bacteria, it just means not using something that's also pretty hostile to humans. Chlorine isn't the best way of killing bacteria in pools, it's just the cheapest.
Note: This post in no way endorses the trolling of Dr Bob.
A 1W laser is about as much of a 'toy' as an AK47 or a flamethrower
So, you mean it's not a toy, it's a really fun toy?
You can combine it with a rotating mirror and a DLP and make monochrome pictures on a wall a long way away? You can fire it at a spinning screen and make Star Wars Holonet-style images?
Here in the UK I don't think we even have Saturday delivery from the Royal Mail..
We do. Most post boxes are also emptied on Saturdays, although typically only one collection rather than the two or more that you get midweek. I quite often get rented DVDs arrive on a Saturday after returning one on a Thursday (new one shipped on Friday, arrives Saturday).
Well, in the specific case of this patent, there are quite a few things covered. For example, the plug that can be inserted in either orientation, and the way in which the device controls the charger. In fact, the real problem with this patent is how specific it is. You could very easily make a power connector that solves the same problems as Apple's MagSafe connector but didn't violate the patent. What you can't do, is produce one that's identical. This means that the patent can only be used to prevent interoperability. It can't be used to encourage people to license Apple's design because any other company could produce their own magnetic connector with a different pin-out for less than Apple would charge for a license. It can be used by Apple to restrict who can make charger products and devices that use Apple's chargers.
Patent treaties don't usually make patents valid abroad automatically, they prevent patenting in one locale from counting as prior disclosure. The point of allowing patents is to encourage disclosure. For this reason, most countries do not allow you to patent something that you have previously disclosed (society gains nothing from it - the invention is already public). This makes getting a patent in two countries impossible - if you filed a patent in France, for example, then you've already disclosed the invention before you try to file in Germany (these days, you can get a European patent and it's valid in several countries, but not between the USA and the EU, for example). This would mean that you couldn't get a patent in Germany. Patent treaties give you some leeway, typically one year, between filing for a patent in one signatory and in another.
Can actually be annotated and highlighted by writing directly on it with a stylus (though the cool kids call them pencils) - and the annotations can be removed using an eraser;
You can do this with my iRex iLiad. The annotations are stored as PNGs, one per page, and there's software for merging them with the PDF (if your handwriting is better than mine then you can run them through handwriting recognition and have the annotations indexed as well). iRex no longer exists - not surprising, they made great hardware but their software sucked - but iRiver (what's with all of these iCompanies) makes a device with similar capabilities: their Cover Story.
No. 25 million light years is a long way. To put it in perspective, that's 250 times the diameter of our galaxy. The fact that you need a telescope to spot it should give you a clue - it's spewing out vast amounts of radiation (or, it was, 25 million years ago), of which visible light is just part, but it's still barely visible with the naked eye. Even if it was emitting 1,000 times as much gamma radiation as visible light, it would be a negligible amount.
I think you should read the actual filing.
I think you should read the actual post that I replied to.
commercial I saw during one of the Sunday morning news shows today, British Petroleum
To be fair, if you're watching commercials from 1998 or earlier and expecting them to give you information about the world of today, then you're probably doing something wrong...
That's disingenuous. Also before the iPad were things like the Nokia N700 (Maemo) and the SmartQ series (Ubuntu/Wince/Android). The SmartQ devices, in particular, look a lot like the Samsung design, yet predate the iPad by years.
Are you disabled or something? Typing is at best 10 times faster than hand-writing.
Only one order of magnitude? Definitely not worth it then...
Plus hand-writing actually gives you time to think about what you're about to write
Nonsense. You spend more time on the mechanics of writing, meaning that you have less time for thinking. I can type a sentence, pause, think, then type the next one, and still be faster than if I were writing by hand without any breaks.
and is more flexible in terms of special characters or layouts (math with a keyboard is /way/ slower than by hand)
Depends on the input method. I can type equations in TeX markup about as fast as I can write them, and the results of the typed form are beautiful, while the results of the handwritten version are just about readable. I can write a natural deduction proof on paper faster than on a computer, but I've never had to do that since university - now I'd be more likely to use an automated / assisted theorem prover where I need to type in fragments and then give it some hints about the steps to try. So, while it's faster to write out by hand, it isn't faster to do the work that writing is a small part of by hand.
Seconded. Great book. Quite a few of the things that it complains about are now obsolete (for example, the main complaint levelled at X11 is due to vendors supporting different sets of extensions, but this is largely irrelevant now that everyone uses the same X server without large sets of proprietary patches). Many of the other points are spot on. The ioctl() system call should have been the point at which they saw that the file is the wrong abstraction for most things.
Really? Tanenbaum is pretty specialised - certainly worth reading, but not sure it's in the most influential. The MINIX book is way too heavy on source code and light on general theory, although Modern Operating Systems is a lot better. If you want something with the detail of the MINIX book, read either Amit Singh's OS X book (which also has a lot of detail about processor architecture) or one of Kirk McCusick's BSD books.
The Knuth series teaches algorithms, but does it badly. It's also light on the general theory. If you want to understand the theoretical side, start with Church and Turing, take a side track into Gödel, and then visit Dijkstra. Skip Knuth entirely. If you want something more in the practical side, read some of Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls' papers from PARC.