Forcing consumers to buy a new DVD player sounds like a prime move that would lead to an instant class-act lawsuit, with a BIG award against the DVD industry for breach of implied contract.
Does anybody know where the click-through license stuff comes from? I'm no lawyer, but I am quite sure that no contract may deprive an American of his or her rights in this country. I understand that such clauses are legally null. Eg. waivers are often disregarded if there is a lawsuit over an issue such as gross negligence.
I'm curious whether this might apply to a click-through license. The digital Millennium act seems to specifically grant the right of reverse engineering for compatibility purposes. Does that supercede the license, or does the license nullify copyright law? What about a shrink-wrapped book with a "no fair use" statement on the front? Would this be legal? I not, how is it different?
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems that the click-through license might be out of line here.
I think that traditional dolby surround used a common back channel, which would add up to three channels. There was a pretty simple phase-cancellation scheme for the encoding, which made it fairly independent, but because it was encoded into two channels, it would have to have the same dimension as those two channels.
The time aspect of each speaker is independent. Think of plotting out the sound, like an oscilloscope. Each channel would have its own pressure-time graph.
It's interesting to consider the effect of your dimensions of sound, as in the real world, we have a limit to the number of dimensions that can really be realized. We basically can consider three dimensions of space plus one of time plus one dimension of pressure at each point, which sums up to a limit of five dimensions to fully describe the sound in any given real-world space. The internal representation may have more dimensions than this, but as it's played, there's always going to be a five-dimensional limit. Most people don't place speakers overhead (though it would be cool if they did!), so there's about four dimensions available. A surround system will provide a limited range: more speakers will get you closer to full four-dimensional sound.
Like I mentioned before, time is a sort of dimensional quantity, because it is independent. However, it is a little different than a classical dimension, because you can't quite treat a time-pressure system as a vector quantity. If you add the two, you get something meaningless, because sound decays (instantly in a vacuum).
Time is pretty independent, but I'm not quite sure how it would best be treated.
Strictly speaking, dimension is a function of independence (find this in a Linear Algebra book). You can easily reason that each independent speaker is an independent dimension of sound. With a Physics book, these dimensions of sound can be broken down further into time and pressure, which constitutes two dimensions. So each speaker encodes two fundamental dimensions. There might be some debate here, because time doesn't quite behave like a normal dimension, but it is essentially independent.
So, your stereo sound card and speakers constitute a four-dimensional system. A new big-name card with four channels actually provides four dimensions of sound, or eight physical dimensions. Don't tell anybody in advertising, as there's enough hype around 3-D whatever as it is!
There exist methods for dealing with systems with non-integral dimension (eg. 1.7 dimensions). This sort of system arises when there is some amount of separation, but there is not true independence (eg. fractals). I'm treading on sparse knowledge for this part, but I suspect that some lossy compression techniques, probably those used in streaming, would reduce the independence between the two speakers, causing a non-rational number of dimensions for streamed stereo sound. Even single-channel lossy compression may limit the dimension by introducing time-amplitude dependencies. If anyone has the theoretical background to do better here, fill in, or render me false on this second paragraph.
I guess that I never stopped to think that every time you use your credit card on the phone, they have to use a pencil and paper to process your order.
Otherwise, they would still need to use one of those dangerous databases!
At the risk of rehashing, I agree that FreeBSD is the faster of the two OSs. The documentation is excellent, and installation problems don't occur. If you know how to edit your own config files in linux, you can figure it out in FreeBSD.
IMO, FreeBSD is worth using just for its ports system. Quite simply, package management that guarantees that 'make install' is enough to get ANYTHING working. It even installs any dependencies that you might need, all using automatic FTP. Install the ports collection, and you have local makefiles for anything you would ever need. You can CVS to keep them up to date.
You'll miss a little bit of the high-volume development that linux has. However, the BSD development method and style provides a more-robust system. You're sacrificing bells and whistles for speed and stability. (Don't get me wrong, I miss some of the whistles sometimes, though usually not the bells:).
Overall, if you're looking to toy around with stuff (like you mentioned), you might be better off in linux. However, if your computer is primarily a workstation, I suggest that you give FreeBSD a try: I'll take it over linux anyday for real work.
Google, as I understand its algorithms, does not do anything behind anybody's back. Its purpose and nature are simply different than Altavista's.
I agree with you about the flawed nature of Excite and Lycos: they are ANNOYING. Google, however, is completely different.
I spent the last two years using the Altavista boolean search almost exclusively. I now favor google for several reasons. The main advantage of google is that it has a useful relevancy scheme based on solid algorithms. The basic consideration is that the internet's topology is useful for picking out the richest sites.
The bottom line for me is that even for technical terms, I find that google's index is much more comprehensive, and that it does a better job at avoiding pages that are designed to attract search engines.
That said, Altavista is always my second location in case I'm unsatisfied with google's results. If Altavista hadn't decided to intentionally neglect some parts of the internet in its index, it would probably be better than google. But google is not a "beginners'" search engine.
It seems that if quantum computers ever become a reality (if they haven't already...), they will be the toys of nuclear powers and their favorite universities for quite a while--like the bomb and Berkeley. After a bit, large corporations will be able to afford the technology, and a few will find uses that warrant the tremendous cost. There will be an effort from day one to bring the technology to the home user, but quantum physics are pretty out there, and the devices will be doubtless very hard to miniaturize.
So, most of us will be forced to use RSA, even when we know the the echelon system can crack our 4096-bit export-restricted keys in all of 2.3 ns (give or take a few orders of magnitude).
This will lead privacy-concerned Americans to do what is becoming popular in countries where strong crypto is illegal: we will turn to steganography. For those slashdotters who haven't read Simon Singh and aren't up on their cryptic (no pun intended) english, that's the art of hiding messages. We sometimes call it security through obscurity. We all know that it's not really no security. If I'm correct, it'll be the best security available to us.
I actually got to ask Simon Singh this question at a recent book reading, and his reply was quite interesting. He pointed out that in addition to the inroads on personal privacy and financial security, the real danger might lie in the realm of world politics. He suggested that the presence of governments that basically posess information omnipotence could drastically alter the balances of world power that we currently have. We all know that the Allied crack of the German cryptosystem was crucial to our victory in WW2. International-conspiracy theorists/prophets should have a field day with the possibilities.
Not much of anybody in the mathematical community thinks that Fermat had anything resembling a proof to this one. There is a fairly reasonable explanation for where Fermat went wrong.
This is a bit of summarizing and paraphrasing from Joseph A. Gallian's Contemporary Abstract Algebra.
"Most likely, he made the error that his successors made by assuming that the properties of integers, such as unique factorization, carry over to integral domains in general."
In 1839, Gabriel Lame announced a proof to FLT. It involves a fairly simple factorization of x^p+y^p into factors with complex coefficients.
The problem is that in this situation, factorization into irreducibles is not unique. This is a property of the integers (45=3*3*5 and no other primes). This property is only true of certain types of algebras--called unique factorization domains. The algebra (or ring, if you're literate) involved in the factorization used by Lame did not hold the property of unique factorization. The proof is much simpler than Wiles' if you assume the property of unique factorization, which was likely Fermat's mistake.
Anyone who's interested in these terms should pick up a college text on abstract algebra. You'll need to read most of an introductory text....
By the way: MATHEMATICIANS ARE NOT SCIENTISTS. We are theorists. I expected more from the slashdot community.:)
Copy II+ was out for the Apple// line well before Apple got into the Macintosh business. Of course, those of us who owned a//gs had the best of both worlds--color Mac interface, but all of the old classic games and software.
I'm going to be very unscientific, because I have no data on hand. However there have been numerous stories published in the major Western-US newspapers (where the speed limits tend to be raised) that show that the average speed over the limit decreases when limits are raised. People still speed, but by less. The claim here is that most people only speed by a few mph, while a handful still drive 15 mph over the limit. This frees up the law enforcement teams to ticket those drivers who are most dangerous, without making judgments about moderate speeders.
Take this with a grain of salt, as I don't have any studies or figures onhand to cite.
Re: Structure of Bucky(ball|tube)s
on
Sir Arthur Speaks
·
· Score: 1
I'm afraid that bucky- structures are not exactly connected triangles of carbon. The buckyball would be a bunch of connected triangles, if nature hadn't cut off all of the tips and created those pentagons. What you end up with is a truncated icosahedron--better known as a soccer ball. This structure has the same symmetry group as the icosahedron [the triangles] but is instead made up of 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons.
If you open any organic chemistry book, you'll notice that carbon seems to like to bond together in rings of 6, hexagons. Carbon seems to support hexagons, pentagons and heptagons with relative stability.
Saw Singh Speak in Berkeley Recently...
on
The Code Book
·
· Score: 1
A few weeks ago, Simon Singh stopped in Berkeley for a reading/talk on the new book. I had the time, went, and it was amazing. He did a great job at laying out the concepts of cryptography and how they've evolved with and shaped society.
One of the most interesting things that I caught was Singh's discussion of steganography--message hiding--and its tangential history. For all of us who've heard (or even claimed) that security through obscurity is no security, it's interesting to see that obscurity has quite a colorful history.
I was also impressed with Singh's handling of the social implications of limited-access strong cryptanalysis (ie. quantum computing or NSA-only factoring algorithm.) I got to ask him about this and he had an interesting perspective on the global financial/militaristic effect this might have.
Though I haven't had a chance to read any Singh, he's absolutely eloquent and certainly knowledgeable. I'd buy a copy if I could afford it (and I had the spare time to pick up any more books.)
If USC wins a patent for the "underlying architectures of this new technology," what are the chances that thought will require a license? Last I checked, my brain uses neural networks with dynamic timing. I pledge to be the first to defy my cease and decist order.
My children will not have their brains surgically removed at differentiation to avoid infringing USC's patent.
IMO, you couldn't be farther from right. Without support from the business world, Open Source is as good as dead: It will just take a smarter Microsoft to erase any good it might do.
On the other hand, if the business world sees experiments by companies like IBM and Netscape succeed, then corporate software will continue to explore the currently-dark-and-scary path of giving away intellectual property.
The maxim of capitalism is simple: If one can't make money, he goes out of business. OSS will be a true revolution if and only if it is demonstrated that it doesn't preclude profits. IBM has a better shot than anybody right now at demonstrating this. Strategically, they're one of our strongest allies.
Slashdot Mirror
Forcing consumers to buy a new DVD player sounds like a prime move that would lead to an instant class-act lawsuit, with a BIG award against the DVD industry for breach of implied contract.
Does anybody know where the click-through license stuff comes from? I'm no lawyer, but I am quite sure that no contract may deprive an American of his or her rights in this country. I understand that such clauses are legally null. Eg. waivers are often disregarded if there is a lawsuit over an issue such as gross negligence.
I'm curious whether this might apply to a click-through license. The digital Millennium act seems to specifically grant the right of reverse engineering for compatibility purposes. Does that supercede the license, or does the license nullify copyright law? What about a shrink-wrapped book with a "no fair use" statement on the front? Would this be legal? I not, how is it different?
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems that the click-through license might be out of line here.
I think that traditional dolby surround used a common back channel, which would add up to three channels. There was a pretty simple phase-cancellation scheme for the encoding, which made it fairly independent, but because it was encoded into two channels, it would have to have the same dimension as those two channels.
The time aspect of each speaker is independent. Think of plotting out the sound, like an oscilloscope. Each channel would have its own pressure-time graph.
It's interesting to consider the effect of your dimensions of sound, as in the real world, we have a limit to the number of dimensions that can really be realized. We basically can consider three dimensions of space plus one of time plus one dimension of pressure at each point, which sums up to a limit of five dimensions to fully describe the sound in any given real-world space. The internal representation may have more dimensions than this, but as it's played, there's always going to be a five-dimensional limit. Most people don't place speakers overhead (though it would be cool if they did!), so there's about four dimensions available. A surround system will provide a limited range: more speakers will get you closer to full four-dimensional sound.
Like I mentioned before, time is a sort of dimensional quantity, because it is independent. However, it is a little different than a classical dimension, because you can't quite treat a time-pressure system as a vector quantity. If you add the two, you get something meaningless, because sound decays (instantly in a vacuum).
Time is pretty independent, but I'm not quite sure how it would best be treated.
Strictly speaking, dimension is a function of independence (find this in a Linear Algebra book). You can easily reason that each independent speaker is an independent dimension of sound. With a Physics book, these dimensions of sound can be broken down further into time and pressure, which constitutes two dimensions. So each speaker encodes two fundamental dimensions. There might be some debate here, because time doesn't quite behave like a normal dimension, but it is essentially independent.
So, your stereo sound card and speakers constitute a four-dimensional system. A new big-name card with four channels actually provides four dimensions of sound, or eight physical dimensions. Don't tell anybody in advertising, as there's enough hype around 3-D whatever as it is!
There exist methods for dealing with systems with non-integral dimension (eg. 1.7 dimensions). This sort of system arises when there is some amount of separation, but there is not true independence (eg. fractals). I'm treading on sparse knowledge for this part, but I suspect that some lossy compression techniques, probably those used in streaming, would reduce the independence between the two speakers, causing a non-rational number of dimensions for streamed stereo sound. Even single-channel lossy compression may limit the dimension by introducing time-amplitude dependencies. If anyone has the theoretical background to do better here, fill in, or render me false on this second paragraph.
I guess that I never stopped to think that every time you use your credit card on the phone, they have to use a pencil and paper to process your order.
Otherwise, they would still need to use one of those dangerous databases!
At the risk of rehashing, I agree that FreeBSD is the faster of the two OSs. The documentation is excellent, and installation problems don't occur. If you know how to edit your own config files in linux, you can figure it out in FreeBSD.
:).
IMO, FreeBSD is worth using just for its ports system. Quite simply, package management that guarantees that 'make install' is enough to get ANYTHING working. It even installs any dependencies that you might need, all using automatic FTP. Install the ports collection, and you have local makefiles for anything you would ever need. You can CVS to keep them up to date.
You'll miss a little bit of the high-volume development that linux has. However, the BSD development method and style provides a more-robust system. You're sacrificing bells and whistles for speed and stability. (Don't get me wrong, I miss some of the whistles sometimes, though usually not the bells
Overall, if you're looking to toy around with stuff (like you mentioned), you might be better off in linux. However, if your computer is primarily a workstation, I suggest that you give FreeBSD a try: I'll take it over linux anyday for real work.
Sounds like college to me...
Google, as I understand its algorithms, does not do anything behind anybody's back. Its purpose and nature are simply different than Altavista's.
I agree with you about the flawed nature of Excite and Lycos: they are ANNOYING. Google, however, is completely different.
I spent the last two years using the Altavista boolean search almost exclusively. I now favor google for several reasons. The main advantage of google is that it has a useful relevancy scheme based on solid algorithms. The basic consideration is that the internet's topology is useful for picking out the richest sites.
The bottom line for me is that even for technical terms, I find that google's index is much more comprehensive, and that it does a better job at avoiding pages that are designed to attract search engines.
That said, Altavista is always my second location in case I'm unsatisfied with google's results. If Altavista hadn't decided to intentionally neglect some parts of the internet in its index, it would probably be better than google. But google is not a "beginners'" search engine.
It seems that if quantum computers ever become a reality (if they haven't already...), they will be the toys of nuclear powers and their favorite universities for quite a while--like the bomb and Berkeley. After a bit, large corporations will be able to afford the technology, and a few will find uses that warrant the tremendous cost. There will be an effort from day one to bring the technology to the home user, but quantum physics are pretty out there, and the devices will be doubtless very hard to miniaturize.
So, most of us will be forced to use RSA, even when we know the the echelon system can crack our 4096-bit export-restricted keys in all of 2.3 ns (give or take a few orders of magnitude).
This will lead privacy-concerned Americans to do what is becoming popular in countries where strong crypto is illegal: we will turn to steganography. For those slashdotters who haven't read Simon Singh and aren't up on their cryptic (no pun intended) english, that's the art of hiding messages. We sometimes call it security through obscurity. We all know that it's not really no security. If I'm correct, it'll be the best security available to us.
I actually got to ask Simon Singh this question at a recent book reading, and his reply was quite interesting. He pointed out that in addition to the inroads on personal privacy and financial security, the real danger might lie in the realm of world politics. He suggested that the presence of governments that basically posess information omnipotence could drastically alter the balances of world power that we currently have. We all know that the Allied crack of the German cryptosystem was crucial to our victory in WW2. International-conspiracy theorists/prophets should have a field day with the possibilities.
Not much of anybody in the mathematical community thinks that Fermat had anything resembling a proof to this one. There is a fairly reasonable explanation for where Fermat went wrong.
:)
This is a bit of summarizing and paraphrasing from Joseph A. Gallian's Contemporary Abstract Algebra.
"Most likely, he made the error that his successors made by assuming that the properties of integers, such as unique factorization, carry over to integral domains in general."
In 1839, Gabriel Lame announced a proof to FLT. It involves a fairly simple factorization of x^p+y^p into factors with complex coefficients.
The problem is that in this situation, factorization into irreducibles is not unique. This is a property of the integers (45=3*3*5 and no other primes). This property is only true of certain types of algebras--called unique factorization domains. The algebra (or ring, if you're literate) involved in the factorization used by Lame did not hold the property of unique factorization. The proof is much simpler than Wiles' if you assume the property of unique factorization, which was likely Fermat's mistake.
Anyone who's interested in these terms should pick up a college text on abstract algebra. You'll need to read most of an introductory text....
By the way: MATHEMATICIANS ARE NOT SCIENTISTS. We are theorists. I expected more from the slashdot community.
Don't mess with my nostalgia...
// line well before Apple got into the Macintosh business. Of course, those of us who owned a //gs had the best of both worlds--color Mac interface, but all of the old classic games and software.
Copy II+ was out for the Apple
Oregon Trail Forever!
I'm going to be very unscientific, because I have no data on hand. However there have been numerous stories published in the major Western-US newspapers (where the speed limits tend to be raised) that show that the average speed over the limit decreases when limits are raised. People still speed, but by less. The claim here is that most people only speed by a few mph, while a handful still drive 15 mph over the limit. This frees up the law enforcement teams to ticket those drivers who are most dangerous, without making judgments about moderate speeders.
Take this with a grain of salt, as I don't have any studies or figures onhand to cite.
I'm afraid that bucky- structures are not exactly connected triangles of carbon. The buckyball would be a bunch of connected triangles, if nature hadn't cut off all of the tips and created those pentagons. What you end up with is a truncated icosahedron--better known as a soccer ball. This structure has the same symmetry group as the icosahedron [the triangles] but is instead made up of 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons.
If you open any organic chemistry book, you'll notice that carbon seems to like to bond together in rings of 6, hexagons. Carbon seems to support hexagons, pentagons and heptagons with relative stability.
A few weeks ago, Simon Singh stopped in Berkeley for a reading/talk on the new book. I had the time, went, and it was amazing. He did a great job at laying out the concepts of cryptography and how they've evolved with and shaped society.
One of the most interesting things that I caught was Singh's discussion of steganography--message hiding--and its tangential history. For all of us who've heard (or even claimed) that security through obscurity is no security, it's interesting to see that obscurity has quite a colorful history.
I was also impressed with Singh's handling of the social implications of limited-access strong cryptanalysis (ie. quantum computing or NSA-only factoring algorithm.) I got to ask him about this and he had an interesting perspective on the global financial/militaristic effect this might have.
Though I haven't had a chance to read any Singh, he's absolutely eloquent and certainly knowledgeable. I'd buy a copy if I could afford it (and I had the spare time to pick up any more books.)
If USC wins a patent for the "underlying architectures of this new technology," what are the chances that thought will require a license? Last I checked, my brain uses neural networks with dynamic timing. I pledge to be the first to defy my cease and decist order.
My children will not have their brains surgically removed at differentiation to avoid infringing USC's patent.
IMO, you couldn't be farther from right. Without support from the business world, Open Source is as good as dead: It will just take a smarter Microsoft to erase any good it might do.
On the other hand, if the business world sees experiments by companies like IBM and Netscape succeed, then corporate software will continue to explore the currently-dark-and-scary path of giving away intellectual property.
The maxim of capitalism is simple: If one can't make money, he goes out of business. OSS will be a true revolution if and only if it is demonstrated that it doesn't preclude profits. IBM has a better shot than anybody right now at demonstrating this. Strategically, they're one of our strongest allies.