Spam merchants are brain-dead. Look carefully at my e-mail address {once you've sussed out the auto-munging that Slashdot has thoughtfully provided} and see what you notice about it. Then explain why I keep getting advertisements for products that are only available, or only work, in the USA. Like cable descramblers..... British cable TV is digital, for crying out loud.....
Spear the spam-merchants with this! It won't stop it altogether, but at least it'll give you evidence as to who is harvesting your address and how widely it is circulating.
The Bible says God created Man first, then took out one of his ribs to make Woman. Jehovah's Witnesses and probably some other groups still claim this as evidence for the biblical creation myth, even though there have been found enough women with 12 ribs and men with 14 to dilute the gender - rib count correlation.
What's to say that God didn't actually create Woman first, then cut off her willy to make Man?
And you don't think that this Jesus character might not kind of twig onto who was believing in him for the right reasons {being a good person}, and who was beliveing in him for the wrong reasons {fear of going to hell}?
Any god like that frankly doesn't deserve to be believed in.....
What makes you believe that there is "something" ? The universe is huuuuuuge, right? And you know what most of it is made up of? Empty space! Even what you think of as "solid" matter, really is mostly empty space. An atom has a tiny nucleus, vast swathes of empty space and then some even tinier electrons whizzing about it. A molecule has football pitches of empty space between atoms.
Now, when nobody is saying anything on the telephone, or the radio or any means of reproducing sound electronically, you hear static -- white noise. Scientists reckon it is due to the way molecules vibrate, occasionally an electron jumps off and inadvertently sets up a current flow..... and who am I to argue {I have got a dusty B. Eng. Electrical and Electronic Engineering somewhere at the bottom of a drawer}..... Anyway, the point is that this noise is largely unavoidable. We'd like it not to be there and we've got used to blanking it out. {Side note; amusing things happen if you have a decent amplifier and someone used to cheapo tranny kit tries to set the volume for "comfortable listening" using the background noise level as a guide;-) }
My "controversial" new theory is that the matter in the universe does not, in fact, exist at all; it is just a kind of "solid static" in a universe that ideally would consist of nothing but empty space.
In all of this..... there is a fact that shines out like a beacon, and that is that the concept of "intellectual property" is a fundamental one..... something you either believe in or you don't.
It's a matter of faith. On one side we have the RIAA believing that ideas can be bought and sold as though they were physical objects, and on the other side we have Lessig, RMS et al believing that ideas cannot be bought and sold because they are not like physical objects. These two fundamentally opposed ideas are never going to be reconciled, any more than say Judaism and Islam, or Catholicism and Protestantism, are ever going to be reconciled. And everybody belongs in one or the other camp - there is no moderate position.
Either all the fruits of all human endeavour belong to all of humanity, or every idea I think of belongs to me and you'd better get used to the idea lest we meet in a court of law. There is nothing in between.
We have copyright and patents as a compromise. Which would be fine, but for a subtle point; money. The RIAA and company have a lot of it. They're greedy and want more of it -- and not so they can share it. The believers in freedom of information don't see money as a prime motivating factor, and {coincidentally or not} they tend to have less of it.
And now we have governments that seem only to listen to money, it gets harder for anyone without stackloads of money to get their voice heard..... Interesting Times.....
Yes - Philips are distinctly unhappy about the idea of the Red Book's name being taken in vain. "Compact Disc Digital Audio" is a standards mark, after all, and if a disc does not conform strictly to the published standard then it has no right to bear the mark. For it to do so robs the standard of credibility, thereby cheapening the reputation of Philips.
And Philips are based in the Netherlands. Not that I'd want to stereotype an entire nation or anything:-) but in my experience, the Dutch are nothing if they're not fair. And I'd trust them to make a compelling case if and when the time becomes right.
Philips are an honest company, which is rare in these days of making a quick buck. More power to their elbow I say.
Actually, there's sprung up a recent cult of Zen Islam. Their core mantra is, "if the mountain won't come to Mohammed, then Mohammed don't need no stinkin' mountain".....
Exactly. If you have a lighted candle, and I take a light from it, then I take my candle somewhere else and someone else takes a light from it, does your room get any darker?
It really annoys me that they trot out this tired old argument over and over again and again like a record stuck in a groove. I can accept that artists have to eat, but they don't have to perform. There are plenty of ways they could be making money - it isn't as though creating art gives you an automatic right to get money out of it. If some record company gives you an advance, then all well and good, but think of that as being all the money you're ever going to make and be satisfied with it.
Soon we won't need the record labels anyway. It's getting to the point where CD-R drives in a SCSI tower are outperforming glass mastering and stamping. Artists already can and do release singles and even albums independently, every city has at least one independent record shop {i.e. not HMV or Virgin}, and local radio stations have a mandate to air items of local significance. {Exactly how rigidly this is enforced is a region-to-region variable, but the BBC play local bands on the local stations, and the others will play anything if you pay them enough.} Artists can put a combination of low-bitrate, full-length {=> listen to the full song with some distortion} and high-bitrate clips {=> check out portions at full quality} on their web sites, and people will want to buy the CDs if they are reasonably priced.
Which, without obscene cuts for the fat-cats, they most probably will be.
If you give a poor man food, they will call you a saint.
If you ask why the poor man has no food, they will call you a communist.
Would you feel free to shoplift a CD from a record store based on that logic?
Copying a CD is in no way analogous to shoplifting from a record store. If I shoplift a CD from a record store, the store no longer has the CD. On the other hand, if I copy a CD - using equipment I have bought, paid for and own, and electricity I have already put money in the meter for - then the record store still has the CD to sell if they want to. And by the way, if I couldn't have copied it, I would not have bought it - I would have gone without.
If I carry out the following:
Triple Chocolate Muffin Recipe {unsuitable for vegans}:
Combine all save chocolate in bowl. Mix on highest speed for c.2 min. until smooth and creamy. Transfer a small amount to each of 12 muffin cases. Add milk chocolate chunks to remainder of mixture, stir with wooden spoon to preserve integrity of chocolate chunks and fill muffin cases. Bake at no. 5 for 20 mins. Melt white chocolate in basin over pan of boiling water and pour over muffins while still slightly warm.
and I pay for all the ingredients, the muffin cases, the mixer, the pans and utensils, the oven and the gas, then am I stealing from a bakery? That is the question.
The assertion that if people don't have a way of making money from their music, then they will not make music any more, is totally bogus. If you are only singing / playing for the money you can make out of it, then you're in it for the wrong reasons. Frankly, I don't think people like that would be a great loss to the world. Sir Joseph Swan put a lot of candle manufacturers out of business with his invention and it was tough titty for them then. When a new invention {cheap recordable CDs} makes an entire industry {manufacture and distribution of CDs} obsolete, why should it be any different today?
If the CD manufacturers still want a cut, they should buy shares in the cable companies and the firms that manufacture the blank media - because that's where most of the action is nowadays.
And I still haven't received a satisfactory answer as to why a pre-recorded CD costs more to buy than a pre-recorded walkman cassette of the same work, when the cassette costs more to manufacture than the CD.
1) This is really the only reason I need to be stating. "Every body has access to it". Other government agencies and/or anti-government/terrorist organizations could easily search the code for exploits and vulnerabilities that would allow them to attack government computers. Depending on how the gov designs their networks and implements the opensource software, it could lead to some serious troubles.
What the hell? That is the point with open source. Anyone can see the source. Anyone can spot and repair vulnerabilities in it. Anyone who is writing it knows what a {excuse my french} prick they would look if anyone saw a flaw in their code.
Whereas with closed source, nobody need ever know..... except, don't governments by their very nature have the right to see the source code of any software made in that country anyway?!
Also I resent the notion that a government, whose wages I am paying, should presume to keep secrets from me, one of the people they serve.
Test for a perfectly fair society: As part of the implementation of the grand reorganisation plan, the architects of that plan should be allocated roles within the new society completely at random. Objecting to that proviso is a little like refusing to stand under a bridge while a procession of fully-laden carts travel over it as part of the opening ceremony.
You build two sets of houses of parliament, or whatever else they are called in Less Civilised Countries. You put a full set of Labour MPs in one, and a full set of Conservative MPs in the other. {Substitute appropriate party names in other countries.}
Everyone gets to choose which one they pay their taxes to. So if you prefer the Tories, you pay your taxes to them and in return you get healthcare from Tory NHS hospitals, security by Conservative Coppers, and so on. Otherwise you can pay your taxes to the Labour government and you get healthcare from Labour hospitals, security from Blair's Bobbies, and so on.
If you try to cheat and don't pay any taxes to anybody, both sets can gang up on you and hunt you down!
A cellular mobile radio telephone includes a radio transmitter. It deliberately and unavoidably uses RF energy for its operation. In addition, modern mobiles transmit digital data, i.e. fast on-off switching of RF. This is the kiss of death for sensitive analogue circuitry.
An aeroplane carries many electrical signals around its wiring harness. These can act as antennas and pick up interference from RF sources. Many were designed when there was less requirement to be immune to RF, because no-one could have envisaged at the time that people would be carrying portable radio transmitters.
Aircraft engines are supposed to be stripped down and rebuilt every so often. I'm not sure whether the requirement applies to wiring harnesses. If so, it would be possible to stipulate that shielded cables be employed. But don't be tempted to think that would be an end to it.
The real problem is one of testability. Automotive electronics are tested by placing the vehicle in a Faraday chamber and bombarding it with RF from a signal generator, amplifier and antenna, and seeing what goes wrong. Obviously, parts can be tested this way too..... My old employer used to make electronic modules for vehicles and domestic appliances, and we had to do this kind of testing throughout the development cycle to get the CE mark {for mains stuff} or the manufacturer's approval {for vehicle stuff}.
Getting a Faraday chamber big enough for an aircraft is a surmountable logistical problem. Actually doing the testing will take a long time.
But the worst is that it takes only the tiniest alteration in a single parameter to completely alter the sensitivity of the whole system. You can do the test in the chamber, and it will pass; but out in the wild, things are different.
Crash investigators moved a step closer to understanding why the 797 literally fell from the sky with no warning. The passenger compartment voice recorder was recovered from the wreckage by a team of firefighters using breathing apparatus and infra-red cameras. The last words captured by recorder sounded like ".....urn that..oody.obile phone off, for...ist's.ake"
Aw, what the hell..... Go ahead and use phones on planes. It's not as though you'd have to live with it on your conscience for long.....
This here document says that if you own an appliance, such as a Linksys Router, which contains GPL'ed code, then you have the right to the source code. The law of the land specifically permits {i.e. prohibits prohibition of} reverse-engineering for certain purposes, including academic and private study.
If you ask a common trespasser to leave your property, and they refuse to comply, you are entitled to use reasonable force to remove them. {Note: common trespass = civil offence => no Old Bill. Not same as aggravated trespass = criminal offence => call the Old Bill.} When they sue you, your defence will rest on there not having been anything less harmful that you could have done to get rid of them.
Stretching the analogy {in fine/. tradition} if you ask someone for a copy of source code to which you are entitled, and they default on their obligations, then you are entitled to use reasonable force to get that source code. Holding a knife to the throat of Linksys' chairman might be considered more than reasonable force, since you could have gleaned the information by a more benign method, i.e. reverse engineering.
So my action plan would be:
Buy one of these routers
Reverse-engineer the firmware and check for GPL code (*)
Publish anything you believe in good faith to be GPL'ed
If anyone complains, point to the GPL and claim reasonable force as a defence {mentioning other less-benign tactics as a straw man}
Remember, even in a Crown court, you only have to convince 2 people out of 12.
* After this step, the one after next may well be comparatively easy.
I believe that the Internet is, first and foremost an adult thing. By its very nature it is not necessarily suitable for children, and making it so would do it a grave disservice. I wouldn't like my kids to be wandering alone in certain parts of town, with the bars and the hookers and the dealers. OTOH, I believe it is perfectly reasonable for an adult to decide what they put into their own body, or look at on the Internet.
I believe it is the responsibility of parents - not the government - to bring up their kids properly. Sure, there will be some with special requirements, and it is the government's responsibility to arrange for those to be met. {Otherwise poverty would aggravate special needs, which is clearly unacceptable.} But learning right from wrong is something that has to come from the family. Part and parcel of this is the idea that parents have to be responsible for the material to which their kids are exposed in print, on TV, in films and on the internet.
I also believe that if parents default on this responsibility, then they should be punished. Obviously, this needs to be done in a way which does not exacerbate the problem.
BUT:I don't believe that anyone should be exposed to any kind of unsolicited advertisements. If I want to buy some viagra substitute, I will ask. If I do not ask you for something, it is because I do not want it. And if you do offer me something I do not want, then if I ever do want it in future, I'll get it from someone else who hasn't invaded my privacy.
One solution for this might be to have a group of servers, or even a whole second-level domain, reserved for family-friendly content. Let's say,.fam.uk for argument's sake. Everything hosted there would be manually verified {or verified by machine to a demonstrably equivalent standard}, and the owning authority would have the power to prosecute anyone posting undesirable content through their machines. Concerned parents would then be able to use software that only worked with.fam.uk web sites and e-mail addresses; the sale of such software, and the privilege of hosting on a.fam.uk server, would be the means of funding the project. {I'm assuming here that anyone who can modify the source code and recompile it deserves to be treated as an adult.}
However, I can't see it working, simply because everyone wants something for nothing and everything is somebody else's problem. I.E. nobody wants to admit that there is such a thing as spam nor porn - if they were acknowledged as really existing then too many people would be too embarrassed; and nobody will want to pay for certified family friendly internet services anyway. Not the parents, who expect the authorities to make everything right, and they pay enough taxes, why should they pay more? And not the family-friendly content providers who are already doing everything right, and they pay their hosting fees, why should they pay more?
In this country you are not allowed to patent a mathematical method nor a computer program, so presumably the LZW / GIF patent issue was never a problem? I guess the situation is similar in other countries.
I don't see how this will kill off the PNG format..... it supports more colours than GIF; isn't lossy like JPG; and reads into applications other than the one that wrote it, unlike TIFF;-)
If you implemented the above-described method in logic gates - flip flops and adders - the result likely would simplify to a shift register with EOR feedback. Multiplying is adding from more than one place, after all, and maybe shifting; and adding is mostly EORing. Your shift register thing could be implemented with a few 74HC series ICs. I have seen this done to generate noise in audio circuits. But if you've already got a whole microprocessor, you may as well use that. The shift register method is no more random than the ZX81's method {using an 8-bit Z-80 processor}. Bigger, more modern processors can, of course, use other values for p and a. You still won't get more randomness; the cycle will repeat itself predictably, sooner or later.
Consider this. {Not much to do with Windows/Linux, but an explanation for some of your disappearing pound notes}.
Scrap merchant's price for 1kg aluminium cans = 35p.
Cost of burying 1kg aluminium cans in landill site = 2p.
Mass of one empty aluminium can =^= 16g.
So, every time someone puts an aluminium can in landfill, they are effectively stealing ((35p - (-2p)) * 0.016) = 0.592p of the council's money {landfilling the can costs 0.032p, recycling it would have netted 0.56p that is now lost}. Extension to other recyclable resources is left as an exercise for the reader {recall that much of the waste stream is organic and has a calorific value which can be realised as a financial value}.
Maybe if you rounded up the idiots who think it's acceptable not to recycle their waste and successfully persuaded them otherwise, then you could be paying less council tax. Maybe less NI, too, since failure-to-recycle is causing asthma in children which is typically being treated using expensive inhalers {ironically creating more waste}.
In a complete turnaround, most apps in this area are of course becoming browser-based on the client side... meaning that MS Servers will interact with linux diskless workstations in the cash-strapped local government world.
I concur. I wrote an application in PHP, Perl and JavaScript {all acting in concert..... PHP includes output from a Perl script [on another server] which actually has PHP statements in it [that was the best way I could think of to pass the information over], and generates JavaScript dynamically to do things the client can do for itself e.g. timed reminders} which, in conjunction with MySQL, replaces a proprietary database solution {Maximiser 97}. All the user needs on their desktop is a web browser {actually, some software to dial a number on a telephone too} whether this be IE or Konqueror. And the only reason we're still using Windows and IE is that pesky phone thing..... once we figure out how to talk to the phones from Linux, we can add an extension to the JS interpreter in the browser, and use our own extended JavaScript!
Expect much, much more of this to happen. If you can write enough PHP to use a MySQL database to store, edit and display cooking recipes, then you're most of the way there.
Are you using a stock kernel, or did you compile your own? If the former, it is unsurprising that your system is slow. If the latter, are you sure you haven't built modules {or worse, hard-compiled in support} for devices you don't have? Did you select the correct architecture? And have you removed unnecessary mount points?
Mandrake is graphically intense and optimised to run on modern hardware. Nothing wrong with that per se, it suits a lot of people but it might not necessarily be right for you. Try a system like {in descending order of geekiness} Slackware, Debian or SuSE and you will get a performance increase.
I see the difference being more like this. Imagine that in the course of your work, you have to tighten a lot of screws with different recessses {slot, Phillips, Posidriv, hex, Torx, S-4, Tri-Wing &c}.
Linux would be like having a set of different screwdrivers; you have to pick out by yourself the one that fits the recesss on the screw you are tightening.
Windows is like a "magic hammer". Built into this wonderful tool is a camera for automatically sensing the kind of recess in the screw, a mechanism for selecting a hex-drive bit and loading it into a chuck, and a ratchet arrangement that allows you to wield it exactly as you would wield a hammer, with the energy to turn the screw being converted from the impact of the driver tip upon the screw. Now there is no more Phillips/Posi confusion, no more the matter of Torx with or without the security pip, and so forth - you, the user, just pick up your Magic Hammer as though it were an ordinary hammer and hit the screw as though it were a nail. The Magic Hammer does all the complicated stuff {identifying the recess, locating the corresponding driver tip, translating the motion} for you. You see a common user interface irrespective of the nature of the problem being solved.
It doesn't take an expert to see that this Magic Hammer has an awful lot of potential failure points, entirely due to the inherent sophistication in its design; the unsophisticated multitude of tools may be overwhelming at first sight, but the fact is that you will only commonly encounter half a dozen screw recesses, and those screwdrivers will work their way to the top of your toolbox where you can most easily reach them.
Remember steel has elastic properties. When you push or pull a steel rod, it deforms slightly as the individual molecules squash up against one another, then revert back to their original arrangement. The deformity actually travels all the way along the rod. Try it yourself using a stretched "Slinky" spring sometime, giving it a jerk towards or away from yourself or even to the side, and observing how the deformity travels.....
Using a laser you can send messages at the speed of light. Using a steel rod you can send messages at the speed of sound in steel {which you can measure yourself, and compare to the speed of sound in air, by listening to a long steel bar as someone taps it..... the sound will travel along the bar much quicker than through the air}, but it still isn't faster than light. This suggests a quantum limit on those physical properties of materials which determine speed of sound - anyone care to enlighten us?
Note that in the case of someone speaking into a hollow steel tube, sound waves are prevented from spreading out {and therefore losing volume} by being reflected off the tube walls {think of this as an acoustic version of fibre optics}. Some sound also travels through the tube walls themselves. The reflected sound takes a longer path than the direct sound, but the wall-borne sound arrives quicker; and the longer the tube, the harder it is to work out what is being said.
P(x) is a function representing a public key, where x is a message and P(x) is the encrypted form of that message using key P().
Analogously, S(x)is a function representing a secret key.
P and S are chosen so that P(S(x)) == S(P(x)) == x.
The general case of S(x) cannot easily be determined by inspection of P(x).
Each person's secret key S is known only to themself, but their public key P is disseminated.
Alice encrypts a message to Bob by sending Pbob(x). Bob evaluates Sbob(Pbob(x)) to determine x. No-one can intercept this message without knowing Sbob(), and see (4) above.
Alice signs a message to Bob by sending Salice(x). Bob evaluates Palice(Salice(x)) to verify that the sender is Alice. No-one can fake this message without knowing Salice(), and see (4) above.
This breaks down at (4). We know from (3) that P(x) is not singular, and the inverse function P-1(x) is mathematically equivalent to S(x). The trick is in generating function-inverse pairs where the derivation of the inverse from first principles would require an extraordinary amount of computations, or in performing many, many computations in as short a time as possible, depending on which side of the fence you are on.
Current schemes involve basically raising numbers to powers, ensuring that the greatest change occurs in the low-order digits and using modulo p arithemetic {think of a clock face numbered from 1 to p} to keep the numbers manageable. Recall that (x ** a) ** b.eq. x ** (a * b). For some values of a, b, p, we will get x ** (a * b).eq. n * p + x.; in other words, (x ** (a * b)) % p.eq. x. Now P(x) = x ** a and S(x) = x ** b. Knowing b we need p to find out a, and getting hold of p is the bit involves many, many calculations.
Quantum Cryptography:
Alice sends photon stream to Bob.
Some of Alice's photons fizzle out into nothing and don't make it as far as Bob.
Eve intercepts some of Alice's photons.
Every photon that Eve received will not be received by Bob.
Bob has to compare what he received with what Alice sent in order to work out which photons went missing.
Any information that Alice sent but Bob didn't receive is ignored.
Alice and Bob now have two identical lists of zeros and ones, which can be used as an encryption key.
For me, this breaks down at (5). If Alice and Bob have to compare their notes somehow, then this is the weak point. It still requires some communication channel, which is susceptible to hi-jacking. If they discuss the sequences over a conventional phone line, it could be tapped. If they have to actually meet, why doesn't Alice just give her encryption key to Bob there and then?
Or have I got this whole thing completely cocked up? If so can someone point out where?
Slashdot Mirror
Spam merchants are brain-dead. Look carefully at my e-mail address {once you've sussed out the auto-munging that Slashdot has thoughtfully provided} and see what you notice about it. Then explain why I keep getting advertisements for products that are only available, or only work, in the USA. Like cable descramblers ..... British cable TV is digital, for crying out loud .....
Spear the spam-merchants with this! It won't stop it altogether, but at least it'll give you evidence as to who is harvesting your address and how widely it is circulating.
The Bible says God created Man first, then took out one of his ribs to make Woman. Jehovah's Witnesses and probably some other groups still claim this as evidence for the biblical creation myth, even though there have been found enough women with 12 ribs and men with 14 to dilute the gender - rib count correlation.
What's to say that God didn't actually create Woman first, then cut off her willy to make Man?
And you don't think that this Jesus character might not kind of twig onto who was believing in him for the right reasons {being a good person}, and who was beliveing in him for the wrong reasons {fear of going to hell}?
.....
Any god like that frankly doesn't deserve to be believed in
What makes you believe that there is "something" ? The universe is huuuuuuge, right? And you know what most of it is made up of? Empty space! Even what you think of as "solid" matter, really is mostly empty space. An atom has a tiny nucleus, vast swathes of empty space and then some even tinier electrons whizzing about it. A molecule has football pitches of empty space between atoms.
..... and who am I to argue {I have got a dusty B. Eng. Electrical and Electronic Engineering somewhere at the bottom of a drawer} ..... Anyway, the point is that this noise is largely unavoidable. We'd like it not to be there and we've got used to blanking it out. {Side note; amusing things happen if you have a decent amplifier and someone used to cheapo tranny kit tries to set the volume for "comfortable listening" using the background noise level as a guide ;-) }
Now, when nobody is saying anything on the telephone, or the radio or any means of reproducing sound electronically, you hear static -- white noise. Scientists reckon it is due to the way molecules vibrate, occasionally an electron jumps off and inadvertently sets up a current flow
My "controversial" new theory is that the matter in the universe does not, in fact, exist at all; it is just a kind of "solid static" in a universe that ideally would consist of nothing but empty space.
In all of this ..... there is a fact that shines out like a beacon, and that is that the concept of "intellectual property" is a fundamental one ..... something you either believe in or you don't.
..... Interesting Times .....
It's a matter of faith. On one side we have the RIAA believing that ideas can be bought and sold as though they were physical objects, and on the other side we have Lessig, RMS et al believing that ideas cannot be bought and sold because they are not like physical objects. These two fundamentally opposed ideas are never going to be reconciled, any more than say Judaism and Islam, or Catholicism and Protestantism, are ever going to be reconciled. And everybody belongs in one or the other camp - there is no moderate position.
Either all the fruits of all human endeavour belong to all of humanity, or every idea I think of belongs to me and you'd better get used to the idea lest we meet in a court of law. There is nothing in between.
We have copyright and patents as a compromise. Which would be fine, but for a subtle point; money. The RIAA and company have a lot of it. They're greedy and want more of it -- and not so they can share it. The believers in freedom of information don't see money as a prime motivating factor, and {coincidentally or not} they tend to have less of it.
And now we have governments that seem only to listen to money, it gets harder for anyone without stackloads of money to get their voice heard
Yes - Philips are distinctly unhappy about the idea of the Red Book's name being taken in vain. "Compact Disc Digital Audio" is a standards mark, after all, and if a disc does not conform strictly to the published standard then it has no right to bear the mark. For it to do so robs the standard of credibility, thereby cheapening the reputation of Philips.
:-) but in my experience, the Dutch are nothing if they're not fair. And I'd trust them to make a compelling case if and when the time becomes right.
And Philips are based in the Netherlands. Not that I'd want to stereotype an entire nation or anything
Philips are an honest company, which is rare in these days of making a quick buck. More power to their elbow I say.
Actually, there's sprung up a recent cult of Zen Islam. Their core mantra is, "if the mountain won't come to Mohammed, then Mohammed don't need no stinkin' mountain" .....
Exactly. If you have a lighted candle, and I take a light from it, then I take my candle somewhere else and someone else takes a light from it, does your room get any darker?
It really annoys me that they trot out this tired old argument over and over again and again like a record stuck in a groove. I can accept that artists have to eat, but they don't have to perform. There are plenty of ways they could be making money - it isn't as though creating art gives you an automatic right to get money out of it. If some record company gives you an advance, then all well and good, but think of that as being all the money you're ever going to make and be satisfied with it.
Soon we won't need the record labels anyway. It's getting to the point where CD-R drives in a SCSI tower are outperforming glass mastering and stamping. Artists already can and do release singles and even albums independently, every city has at least one independent record shop {i.e. not HMV or Virgin}, and local radio stations have a mandate to air items of local significance. {Exactly how rigidly this is enforced is a region-to-region variable, but the BBC play local bands on the local stations, and the others will play anything if you pay them enough.} Artists can put a combination of low-bitrate, full-length {=> listen to the full song with some distortion} and high-bitrate clips {=> check out portions at full quality} on their web sites, and people will want to buy the CDs if they are reasonably priced.
Which, without obscene cuts for the fat-cats, they most probably will be.
If you give a poor man food, they will call you a saint.
If you ask why the poor man has no food, they will call you a communist.
..... and the banana curve effect .....
If I carry out the following: and I pay for all the ingredients, the muffin cases, the mixer, the pans and utensils, the oven and the gas, then am I stealing from a bakery? That is the question.
The assertion that if people don't have a way of making money from their music, then they will not make music any more, is totally bogus. If you are only singing / playing for the money you can make out of it, then you're in it for the wrong reasons. Frankly, I don't think people like that would be a great loss to the world. Sir Joseph Swan put a lot of candle manufacturers out of business with his invention and it was tough titty for them then. When a new invention {cheap recordable CDs} makes an entire industry {manufacture and distribution of CDs} obsolete, why should it be any different today?
If the CD manufacturers still want a cut, they should buy shares in the cable companies and the firms that manufacture the blank media - because that's where most of the action is nowadays.
And I still haven't received a satisfactory answer as to why a pre-recorded CD costs more to buy than a pre-recorded walkman cassette of the same work, when the cassette costs more to manufacture than the CD.
Whereas with closed source, nobody need ever know
Also I resent the notion that a government, whose wages I am paying, should presume to keep secrets from me, one of the people they serve.
Test for a perfectly fair society: As part of the implementation of the grand reorganisation plan, the architects of that plan should be allocated roles within the new society completely at random. Objecting to that proviso is a little like refusing to stand under a bridge while a procession of fully-laden carts travel over it as part of the opening ceremony.
I have a better idea.
You build two sets of houses of parliament, or whatever else they are called in Less Civilised Countries. You put a full set of Labour MPs in one, and a full set of Conservative MPs in the other. {Substitute appropriate party names in other countries.}
Everyone gets to choose which one they pay their taxes to. So if you prefer the Tories, you pay your taxes to them and in return you get healthcare from Tory NHS hospitals, security by Conservative Coppers, and so on. Otherwise you can pay your taxes to the Labour government and you get healthcare from Labour hospitals, security from Blair's Bobbies, and so on.
If you try to cheat and don't pay any taxes to anybody, both sets can gang up on you and hunt you down!
An aeroplane carries many electrical signals around its wiring harness. These can act as antennas and pick up interference from RF sources. Many were designed when there was less requirement to be immune to RF, because no-one could have envisaged at the time that people would be carrying portable radio transmitters.
Aircraft engines are supposed to be stripped down and rebuilt every so often. I'm not sure whether the requirement applies to wiring harnesses. If so, it would be possible to stipulate that shielded cables be employed. But don't be tempted to think that would be an end to it.
The real problem is one of testability. Automotive electronics are tested by placing the vehicle in a Faraday chamber and bombarding it with RF from a signal generator, amplifier and antenna, and seeing what goes wrong. Obviously, parts can be tested this way too
Getting a Faraday chamber big enough for an aircraft is a surmountable logistical problem. Actually doing the testing will take a long time.
But the worst is that it takes only the tiniest alteration in a single parameter to completely alter the sensitivity of the whole system. You can do the test in the chamber, and it will pass; but out in the wild, things are different. Aw, what the hell
If you ask a common trespasser to leave your property, and they refuse to comply, you are entitled to use reasonable force to remove them. {Note: common trespass = civil offence => no Old Bill. Not same as aggravated trespass = criminal offence => call the Old Bill.} When they sue you, your defence will rest on there not having been anything less harmful that you could have done to get rid of them.
Stretching the analogy {in fine
So my action plan would be:
- Buy one of these routers
- Reverse-engineer the firmware and check for GPL code (*)
- Publish anything you believe in good faith to be GPL'ed
- If anyone complains, point to the GPL and claim reasonable force as a defence {mentioning other less-benign tactics as a straw man}
- Remember, even in a Crown court, you only have to convince 2 people out of 12.
* After this step, the one after next may well be comparatively easy.- I believe that the Internet is, first and foremost an adult thing. By its very nature it is not necessarily suitable for children, and making it so would do it a grave disservice. I wouldn't like my kids to be wandering alone in certain parts of town, with the bars and the hookers and the dealers. OTOH, I believe it is perfectly reasonable for an adult to decide what they put into their own body, or look at on the Internet.
- I believe it is the responsibility of parents - not the government - to bring up their kids properly. Sure, there will be some with special requirements, and it is the government's responsibility to arrange for those to be met. {Otherwise poverty would aggravate special needs, which is clearly unacceptable.} But learning right from wrong is something that has to come from the family. Part and parcel of this is the idea that parents have to be responsible for the material to which their kids are exposed in print, on TV, in films and on the internet.
- I also believe that if parents default on this responsibility, then they should be punished. Obviously, this needs to be done in a way which does not exacerbate the problem.
- BUT:I don't believe that anyone should be exposed to any kind of unsolicited advertisements. If I want to buy some viagra substitute, I will ask. If I do not ask you for something, it is because I do not want it. And if you do offer me something I do not want, then if I ever do want it in future, I'll get it from someone else who hasn't invaded my privacy.
One solution for this might be to have a group of servers, or even a whole second-level domain, reserved for family-friendly content. Let's say,However, I can't see it working, simply because everyone wants something for nothing and everything is somebody else's problem. I.E. nobody wants to admit that there is such a thing as spam nor porn - if they were acknowledged as really existing then too many people would be too embarrassed; and nobody will want to pay for certified family friendly internet services anyway. Not the parents, who expect the authorities to make everything right, and they pay enough taxes, why should they pay more? And not the family-friendly content providers who are already doing everything right, and they pay their hosting fees, why should they pay more?
In this country you are not allowed to patent a mathematical method nor a computer program, so presumably the LZW / GIF patent issue was never a problem? I guess the situation is similar in other countries.
..... it supports more colours than GIF; isn't lossy like JPG; and reads into applications other than the one that wrote it, unlike TIFF ;-)
I don't see how this will kill off the PNG format
A non-story. Ting! Next, please.
If you implemented the above-described method in logic gates - flip flops and adders - the result likely would simplify to a shift register with EOR feedback. Multiplying is adding from more than one place, after all, and maybe shifting; and adding is mostly EORing. Your shift register thing could be implemented with a few 74HC series ICs. I have seen this done to generate noise in audio circuits. But if you've already got a whole microprocessor, you may as well use that. The shift register method is no more random than the ZX81's method {using an 8-bit Z-80 processor}. Bigger, more modern processors can, of course, use other values for p and a. You still won't get more randomness; the cycle will repeat itself predictably, sooner or later.
Shame, I thought I might have discovered something ;-) Makes total sense, though. Thank you.
..... Is a bridge rectifier connected to a noise source a manifestation of Maxwell's Daemon?
'bout the moniker, BTW
Maybe if you rounded up the idiots who think it's acceptable not to recycle their waste and successfully persuaded them otherwise, then you could be paying less council tax. Maybe less NI, too, since failure-to-recycle is causing asthma in children which is typically being treated using expensive inhalers {ironically creating more waste}.
Expect much, much more of this to happen. If you can write enough PHP to use a MySQL database to store, edit and display cooking recipes, then you're most of the way there.
Are you using a stock kernel, or did you compile your own? If the former, it is unsurprising that your system is slow. If the latter, are you sure you haven't built modules {or worse, hard-compiled in support} for devices you don't have? Did you select the correct architecture? And have you removed unnecessary mount points?
Mandrake is graphically intense and optimised to run on modern hardware. Nothing wrong with that per se, it suits a lot of people but it might not necessarily be right for you. Try a system like {in descending order of geekiness} Slackware, Debian or SuSE and you will get a performance increase.
Or used KWord ..... Why make a complex mechanical page-turner when you can just print your music notes on bigger sheets of paper?
I see the difference being more like this. Imagine that in the course of your work, you have to tighten a lot of screws with different recessses {slot, Phillips, Posidriv, hex, Torx, S-4, Tri-Wing &c}.
Linux would be like having a set of different screwdrivers; you have to pick out by yourself the one that fits the recesss on the screw you are tightening.
Windows is like a "magic hammer". Built into this wonderful tool is a camera for automatically sensing the kind of recess in the screw, a mechanism for selecting a hex-drive bit and loading it into a chuck, and a ratchet arrangement that allows you to wield it exactly as you would wield a hammer, with the energy to turn the screw being converted from the impact of the driver tip upon the screw. Now there is no more Phillips/Posi confusion, no more the matter of Torx with or without the security pip, and so forth - you, the user, just pick up your Magic Hammer as though it were an ordinary hammer and hit the screw as though it were a nail. The Magic Hammer does all the complicated stuff {identifying the recess, locating the corresponding driver tip, translating the motion} for you. You see a common user interface irrespective of the nature of the problem being solved.
It doesn't take an expert to see that this Magic Hammer has an awful lot of potential failure points, entirely due to the inherent sophistication in its design; the unsophisticated multitude of tools may be overwhelming at first sight, but the fact is that you will only commonly encounter half a dozen screw recesses, and those screwdrivers will work their way to the top of your toolbox where you can most easily reach them.
Remember steel has elastic properties. When you push or pull a steel rod, it deforms slightly as the individual molecules squash up against one another, then revert back to their original arrangement. The deformity actually travels all the way along the rod. Try it yourself using a stretched "Slinky" spring sometime, giving it a jerk towards or away from yourself or even to the side, and observing how the deformity travels .....
..... the sound will travel along the bar much quicker than through the air}, but it still isn't faster than light. This suggests a quantum limit on those physical properties of materials which determine speed of sound - anyone care to enlighten us?
Using a laser you can send messages at the speed of light. Using a steel rod you can send messages at the speed of sound in steel {which you can measure yourself, and compare to the speed of sound in air, by listening to a long steel bar as someone taps it
Note that in the case of someone speaking into a hollow steel tube, sound waves are prevented from spreading out {and therefore losing volume} by being reflected off the tube walls {think of this as an acoustic version of fibre optics}. Some sound also travels through the tube walls themselves. The reflected sound takes a longer path than the direct sound, but the wall-borne sound arrives quicker; and the longer the tube, the harder it is to work out what is being said.
- P(x) is a function representing a public key, where x is a message and P(x) is the encrypted form of that message using key P().
- Analogously, S(x)is a function representing a secret key.
- P and S are chosen so that P(S(x)) == S(P(x)) == x.
- The general case of S(x) cannot easily be determined by inspection of P(x).
- Each person's secret key S is known only to themself, but their public key P is disseminated.
- Alice encrypts a message to Bob by sending Pbob(x). Bob evaluates Sbob(Pbob(x)) to determine x. No-one can intercept this message without knowing Sbob(), and see (4) above.
- Alice signs a message to Bob by sending Salice(x). Bob evaluates Palice(Salice(x)) to verify that the sender is Alice. No-one can fake this message without knowing Salice(), and see (4) above.
This breaks down at (4). We know from (3) that P(x) is not singular, and the inverse function P-1(x) is mathematically equivalent to S(x). The trick is in generating function-inverse pairs where the derivation of the inverse from first principles would require an extraordinary amount of computations, or in performing many, many computations in as short a time as possible, depending on which side of the fence you are on.Current schemes involve basically raising numbers to powers, ensuring that the greatest change occurs in the low-order digits and using modulo p arithemetic {think of a clock face numbered from 1 to p} to keep the numbers manageable. Recall that (x ** a) ** b
Quantum Cryptography:
- Alice sends photon stream to Bob.
- Some of Alice's photons fizzle out into nothing and don't make it as far as Bob.
- Eve intercepts some of Alice's photons.
- Every photon that Eve received will not be received by Bob.
- Bob has to compare what he received with what Alice sent in order to work out which photons went missing.
- Any information that Alice sent but Bob didn't receive is ignored.
- Alice and Bob now have two identical lists of zeros and ones, which can be used as an encryption key.
For me, this breaks down at (5). If Alice and Bob have to compare their notes somehow, then this is the weak point. It still requires some communication channel, which is susceptible to hi-jacking. If they discuss the sequences over a conventional phone line, it could be tapped. If they have to actually meet, why doesn't Alice just give her encryption key to Bob there and then?Or have I got this whole thing completely cocked up? If so can someone point out where?