Babbage, Da Vinci, and several others had ideas that couldn't be effectively implemented in their own age, yet we still remember them. On the whole, if an idea is useful enough it is usually rediscovered by science when it becomes practical. Sometimes we may forget who the originator was or name a discovery after a re-discoverer, but it's *all* built on the shoulders of giants.
As you said, the problem is how to divvy up the money. Is it worth funding 20,000 mathematicians for a year? Most of them would be mathematicians anyway. What 20,000 physicists can't do on their own is build a large hadron collider.
And the ballots should be stored in the bottom drawer of an old filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign saying "beware of tiger" in a stairwayless basement. And the polling box should be placed on top of some high mountain with either a high probability of a) avalanches, or b) flash floods, depending on the weather.
The public airwaves are just as much mine as they are yours. The fact that ancient computer trespass laws and bumbling politicians can't keep up with modern technology shouldn't be surprising.
Your faith in big pharmaceutical companies is amusing. The U.S. government funds close to a third of medical research, much of which ends up being patented and marketed by a large pharmaceutical company.
And when you go to http://www.startpage.com/ as with www.google.com, your ISP is likely to redirect you to their own search portal or otherwise not forward you to the actual SSL page that you wanted.
Using SSL via an https URL starting from the very first web request is the *only* way to maintain privacy.
And when it breaks because your provider is going bankrupt...? Hopefully you at least back up your customer/inventory/product database in an open format on a regular basis. It's not so much the cloud hosting that's dangerous, it's outsourcing all the knowledge of how your site works to people who may not be there in 5 years.
Is VMWare a work requirement? If not, is kvm an option? I'm using kvm on slackware64 13.0 at work with no problems. An Ethertap bridge or qemu's userspace NAT works fine with Windows in an AD environment (although there are some limitations with userspace NAT). The Windows VirtIO drivers for disk and network were pretty easy to get working.
Time to introduce Godel statements into as many legal systems as possible.
X = "The law hereby described as X has no derivation from legal doctrine that proves its legitimacy, nor any derivation from legal doctrine that disproves its legitimacy. Also, patents suck."
The question is whether existing patent law is fair as the number of inventors grows exponentially. I think there must be a fundamental relationship like patent_term * number_of_inventors = some_constant to avoid the situation where multiple simultaneous discoveries of new inventions result in unfair legal decisions against all but one of the inventors. Additionally, the size of current markets and the rapidity of R&D make 25 year patents seem like an anachronism. I'd say 1 to 5 years is appropriate now.
Reducing patent terms is probably about as easy as reducing the length of copyright terms (which is subject to similar arguments), and we've seen how well that worked out. Hence my hatred for patents and copyright in general. I don't care that I won't get sued for using mplayer or FAT32 with long file names; I hate that when I buy software or electronics I have to pay royalties to patent trolls who do absolutely nothing except sue useful companies, or put up with ancient technology because companies are afraid of patents. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" indeed.
So where can the law reasonably draw the line at what is acceptable to record and what is not?
It may be necessary to record traffic for any number of reasons, so why isn't Google's reason to record traffic legitimate? Is it because they weren't trying to troubleshoot their own network? Is it because they recorded entire data packets?
If it's the former, then it seems like basic research into the usage of the public wireless spectrum could also be prohibited.
If it's the latter reason it seems like an undue burden placed on the recorder to filter "private" traffic out of the public airwaves. For instance, if an access point is not broadcasting its SSID but is operational, it is necessary to process all traffic in order to detect its MAC address for geolocation purposes. It may not be feasible to process this data in realtime while driving around town, and recording it for later processing is the only option. To me, there are dozens of legitimate reasons one might want to record a significant portion of packets that are broadcast on a public unlicensed spectrum for later analysis. It depends on the legal definition of which packets are "private." Any reasonable legal system would not consider SSID broadcasts from an AP as prviate (I hope...), but what about the number of MAC addresses that are associated with that AP? The number of IP addresses? The number of packets? The protocols used in the packets?
So running wireshark (which records the packets it captures) in my own home to troubleshoot my own wireless router is illegal because I'll record my neighbor's unencrypted packets too?
Accidental or incidental recording should not be illegal because it's so incredibly easy to do by mistake, and so incredibly easy to prevent on behalf of the affected party with encryption.
Intentionally recording wireless traffic is also necessary for security analysis. If you own an airport and offer free wifi, it's pretty much your responsibility to log and monitor all wireless traffic to detect and shut down rogue access points used for phishing or other fraud. How do you do that without recording?
"We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs"
So I should be able to run flash apps on my fully GPL computer with the open standard they're going to release for the flash virtual machine tomorrow, right? I expect I'll be getting an open spec for inner workings of their PDF and eReader DRM as well?
Or by "freely" do they mean vendor lock-in with a zero price binary blob that might run some content on a few platforms?
The military industrial complex is inefficient. That's no secret. The DMV is quite efficient; look how many citizens they can serve at once with only 5 low paid FTEs in the whole place! You reap the rewards of that efficiency with your relatively low tax rate and you only have to put up with a little inconvenience for the savings. Low wait times aren't efficient. They're expensive because most of the time there are workers sitting idle.
Hardware-wise, I'd like to see TPM hardware that is made in the US, and supervised vetted from the ground up by DoD employees. This won't completely stop any backdoors, but it would lesson the chances of some added "functionality" on a chip appearing from the fab out of Shanghai when it shouldn't be there (such as storing keys unencrypted for later retrieval via an undocumented command.)
Every TPM chip stores its endorsement key unencrypted, otherwise it would have the functionality of a brick.
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The standard solution is to issue a single paycheck for them to divvy up.
Babbage, Da Vinci, and several others had ideas that couldn't be effectively implemented in their own age, yet we still remember them. On the whole, if an idea is useful enough it is usually rediscovered by science when it becomes practical. Sometimes we may forget who the originator was or name a discovery after a re-discoverer, but it's *all* built on the shoulders of giants.
As you said, the problem is how to divvy up the money. Is it worth funding 20,000 mathematicians for a year? Most of them would be mathematicians anyway. What 20,000 physicists can't do on their own is build a large hadron collider.
And the ballots should be stored in the bottom drawer of an old filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign saying "beware of tiger" in a stairwayless basement. And the polling box should be placed on top of some high mountain with either a high probability of a) avalanches, or b) flash floods, depending on the weather.
The public airwaves are just as much mine as they are yours. The fact that ancient computer trespass laws and bumbling politicians can't keep up with modern technology shouldn't be surprising.
In fusion, you cannot design a rector such that this doesn't occur, because the reaction actually stops as soon as anything goes wrong.
At least until your species is capable of constructing fusion reactors approaching the mass of small stars...
Repeat the process until twitter is spending 95% of its CPU/database time resolving chains of links to itself.
Thankfully, the assholes generally shoot the traffic vigilantes in a fit of road rage and we don't have to deal with either of you after that..
Your faith in big pharmaceutical companies is amusing. The U.S. government funds close to a third of medical research, much of which ends up being patented and marketed by a large pharmaceutical company.
Soldiers will happily fire on "traitors."
And when you go to http://www.startpage.com/ as with www.google.com, your ISP is likely to redirect you to their own search portal or otherwise not forward you to the actual SSL page that you wanted.
Using SSL via an https URL starting from the very first web request is the *only* way to maintain privacy.
And when it breaks because your provider is going bankrupt...? Hopefully you at least back up your customer/inventory/product database in an open format on a regular basis. It's not so much the cloud hosting that's dangerous, it's outsourcing all the knowledge of how your site works to people who may not be there in 5 years.
...and doesn't rely on a rare elements(lithium)?
Oh, you mean like oil or coal?
Gee, I thought they would have just created mule accounts. It's what everyone did back in the BBS days.
Is VMWare a work requirement? If not, is kvm an option? I'm using kvm on slackware64 13.0 at work with no problems. An Ethertap bridge or qemu's userspace NAT works fine with Windows in an AD environment (although there are some limitations with userspace NAT). The Windows VirtIO drivers for disk and network were pretty easy to get working.
You forgot to use the backdoor the worm had installed in the computer to send an anonymous email, didn't you?
As opposed to the cross-word, the distraction of yesteryear.
At least that promoted vocabulary and a little bit of logical thinking.
Time to introduce Godel statements into as many legal systems as possible.
X = "The law hereby described as X has no derivation from legal doctrine that proves its legitimacy, nor any derivation from legal doctrine that disproves its legitimacy. Also, patents suck."
Rule on that, suckers.
The question is whether existing patent law is fair as the number of inventors grows exponentially. I think there must be a fundamental relationship like patent_term * number_of_inventors = some_constant to avoid the situation where multiple simultaneous discoveries of new inventions result in unfair legal decisions against all but one of the inventors. Additionally, the size of current markets and the rapidity of R&D make 25 year patents seem like an anachronism. I'd say 1 to 5 years is appropriate now.
Reducing patent terms is probably about as easy as reducing the length of copyright terms (which is subject to similar arguments), and we've seen how well that worked out. Hence my hatred for patents and copyright in general. I don't care that I won't get sued for using mplayer or FAT32 with long file names; I hate that when I buy software or electronics I have to pay royalties to patent trolls who do absolutely nothing except sue useful companies, or put up with ancient technology because companies are afraid of patents. "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" indeed.
So where can the law reasonably draw the line at what is acceptable to record and what is not?
It may be necessary to record traffic for any number of reasons, so why isn't Google's reason to record traffic legitimate? Is it because they weren't trying to troubleshoot their own network? Is it because they recorded entire data packets?
If it's the former, then it seems like basic research into the usage of the public wireless spectrum could also be prohibited.
If it's the latter reason it seems like an undue burden placed on the recorder to filter "private" traffic out of the public airwaves. For instance, if an access point is not broadcasting its SSID but is operational, it is necessary to process all traffic in order to detect its MAC address for geolocation purposes. It may not be feasible to process this data in realtime while driving around town, and recording it for later processing is the only option. To me, there are dozens of legitimate reasons one might want to record a significant portion of packets that are broadcast on a public unlicensed spectrum for later analysis. It depends on the legal definition of which packets are "private." Any reasonable legal system would not consider SSID broadcasts from an AP as prviate (I hope...), but what about the number of MAC addresses that are associated with that AP? The number of IP addresses? The number of packets? The protocols used in the packets?
Remember, it's not about seeing the data, it's about recording it.
What about the poor souls with photographic memory? They obviously violate copyright laws too, but that's another discussion.
Receive? Yes. Record? Not necessarily.
So running wireshark (which records the packets it captures) in my own home to troubleshoot my own wireless router is illegal because I'll record my neighbor's unencrypted packets too?
Accidental or incidental recording should not be illegal because it's so incredibly easy to do by mistake, and so incredibly easy to prevent on behalf of the affected party with encryption.
Intentionally recording wireless traffic is also necessary for security analysis. If you own an airport and offer free wifi, it's pretty much your responsibility to log and monitor all wireless traffic to detect and shut down rogue access points used for phishing or other fraud. How do you do that without recording?
No wonder we don't see too many posters from the EU, what with their inability to access slashdot.org's network without prior authorization.
"We believe that consumers should be able to freely access their favorite content and applications, regardless of what computer they have, what browser they like, or what device suits their needs"
So I should be able to run flash apps on my fully GPL computer with the open standard they're going to release for the flash virtual machine tomorrow, right? I expect I'll be getting an open spec for inner workings of their PDF and eReader DRM as well?
Or by "freely" do they mean vendor lock-in with a zero price binary blob that might run some content on a few platforms?
The military industrial complex is inefficient. That's no secret. The DMV is quite efficient; look how many citizens they can serve at once with only 5 low paid FTEs in the whole place! You reap the rewards of that efficiency with your relatively low tax rate and you only have to put up with a little inconvenience for the savings. Low wait times aren't efficient. They're expensive because most of the time there are workers sitting idle.
Hardware-wise, I'd like to see TPM hardware that is made in the US, and supervised vetted from the ground up by DoD employees. This won't completely stop any backdoors, but it would lesson the chances of some added "functionality" on a chip appearing from the fab out of Shanghai when it shouldn't be there (such as storing keys unencrypted for later retrieval via an undocumented command.)
Every TPM chip stores its endorsement key unencrypted, otherwise it would have the functionality of a brick.