Google's shit isn't *on by default* on new OS installs. Installing it is a conscious choice.
As long as Microsoft keeps to that, I'm perfectly fine with them offering this, just as I was with Google Desktop.
The problem lies in the fact that Microsoft has been notoriously known to put this kind of stuff into default installs, which is where I shudder, and people at google look at themselves in the mirror and ask "OMG, What have we done?! Sure, *we* do no evil, but others with our ideas?"
Re:What you need is a signed id3 tag with that inf
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False Copyright Claims
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· Score: 1
Yes and no. We're both suggesting the same be done, only you're discussing what I suggested be "Phase B" (suggesting doing everything in a single phase), whereas I was suggesting the trivial bit that would rake in a substantial part of the benefits be done first and soon, and the more elaborate part regarding how this tag propagates to derived works be worked up in a later revision.
I'd rather the former be available at t=1 and the latter at t=3 than all of it be available at t=2.5
As an interesting sidenote, I haven't examined the recent itunes tags (the very talked-about apple-publicizing with-your-email unencrypted tags), but do they in any form [a] contain some kind of checksum of the audio stream in the aac file in question? [b] contain any mention of the actual copyright holder? (not to be confused with artist, which is doubtlessly there...)
Re:What you need is a signed id3 tag with that inf
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False Copyright Claims
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>> In a sense, you need to break free from the idea of digital signatures, except for signing the data in the tag itself.
Yes, and if pigs could fly.
Since [a] Most media uses lossy codecs that effectively modify the core data in question [b] You're designing this for future lossy codecs that are not invented yet.
I'd be happy if we had said signed id3 tags on the exact-md5-originals, since that is something we *can do right now*, and add additional possibly dodgy (false-positives-wise) stuff for derivate recoded versions later, given we can get it to work. I'd rather not hang the easily-done former by our (debatable) (future) ability to achieve the latter.
I don't support the notion that says "The wright brothers should never have invented something less than a Boeing 747". If they'd have had to start that high, we wouldn't be flying. Introduce the first level of useful tech, then evolve it with time. The everything-or-nothing approach is the worst enemy of getting anything out the door.
What you need is a signed id3 tag with that info, not DRM. ID3 tags containing an md5sum of the work (audio track, ebook, jpeg, what have you). Preferrably, appended to the file itself, so when the file makes the rounds, so does the copyright holder information.
Further, this should be made *MANDATORY* by law on any electronic work that claims copyright.
This would be a very good thing for all except the MAFIAA -
It would serve several causes: 1. It would paint a big mother of a "SUE ME" target on the forehead of any publishing house attempting copyfraud.
2. Indy artists, listen carefully: this would allow anyone to easily get in touch (read: PAY) with the copyright holder.
A signed, reliable and easily-verifyable-by-joe-consumer link to a direct-to-artist Paypal account, directly in the id3. This would serve to maximize goodwill payment by a nontrivial subgroup of sharers who do want to pay the artists, quite possibly live elsewhere in the world where US copyright law is the least of their worries, and simply do not want their money to end up in the wrong hands. (Same thing in non-signed and non-easily-verifyable id3 tags is simply an invitation for "nigerian" fraud).
3. In a small sense this would also be good for the MAFIAA (it would make it easier for people to legally license something they want to use, thus increasing the percentage of people who actually do so, however, this may or may not (pro'lly not) be offset by the fact that item [2] above may lose them money by circumventing them and [1] may lose them money for works they are currently profiting off copyfraud from.
Maybe not fair, but at least in a morally defendable one, and one that serves as a positive force elsewhere (pulling countries like China UP - better human rights - rather than pushing the US down).
Those that employ Hammer-Engineers and Screwdriver-Engineers, as opposed to those who employ carpenters.
I'm in the same spot you are. I'm a coder, a sysadmin, I do server support, desktop support, network support, firewalls, routers, topology planning, you name it. Geek through and through.
My experience teaches me I'll NEVER be happy in a place that hires Hammer Engineers. Why? for one thing, because I'd be undervalued from day one ("How many years of experience do you have managing Veritas Netbackup?"... "3, but I've been a sysadmin for 15 and did other backup software etc etc..", "No, we're looking for a Veritas Netbackup Engineer who did this for at least 5 years". These people see me as a junior netbackup "engineer" of 3 year experience and lots of totally irrelevant other history. As far as they care, I could have been shoveling shit for the rest of my career, it wouldn't matter. They can't see the relevance.
Now, if by any odd fate you'd end up working there, you'd be sitting among people who made a career of running Netbackup, or Solstice Disksuite, or BMC, or notepad, or whatever. People the majority of whom cannot manage their own windows box. People who don't meddle and tweak and experiment what they're given to, seeing themselves as specialists in their field and knowing nothing but ("You're a SOLARIS administrator! WHY are you wasting your time on practicing your coding skills?!")
This is, of course, an extreme case, but it's a real-life one I've worked on and hated every second. Contributing factors are size of company, non-technical management (the level of management directly responsible for hiring the tech people, not senior management) that have limited capability of gouging how well a candidate fits a role other than by narrowing down the scope of the role to something their non-technical minds can grasp and putting a numeric estimate (# of years experience) on that. Companies with high employee turnover rates that use these narrow-scope-job-roles to easily replace people, etc.
I'm not an Open Source fanboy. I'm pragmatic both ends of the divide, and am just as good using paid solutions as unpaid ones. I'm for *thinking*, then doing what's best. These hammer-engineer-hiring companies typically stay away from the thinking bit, some having policies dictated by FUD-overfed clueless management. When I mentioned simple solutions like using some Open Source tools, I ran into a fucking concrete wall, just making me more frustrated.
I've since moved to a company that hires carpenters. ONLY carpenters. When I hit here, there were 3 of us taking care of a 300-odd-employee organization, ~100-200 servers, 3 int'l subsidiaries, and everything from PABX to desktops to servers. Needless to say, all three of us were complete JOAT's that had the required skills to put into production anything the organization required, given access to google, the net, and a reasonable amount of time to learn and implement the topic. We've since become 8 people, and being a Jack-of-All-Trades is the only way one would ever get to work here. The sysadmins code, the coders can do their [linux!] desktop box without desktop support changing their diapers.
This kind of employer is YOUR home court. Whereas you would almost always be undervalued, underpromoted and underpaid at the former kind, here you are valued significantly higher than a specialized candidate. Needless to say, the proximity of likeminded individuals will very simply and in the most literal sense, make your work really really fun. If I had a gazillion dollars, I'd quit my former job, yet I would keep working at this one because I enjoy it.
To narrow down the places you want to be looking for, look for the following: 1. Places that are not afraid to use open-source. More often then not (obviously not always) this requires people who "know their shit" to properly piece together and manage. When I was looking for a job, I found the following search criteria to plug into job-ad searches to
Bittorrent (or the next generation of P2P, be that whatever) will simply adjust.
I can think offhand of at least two simple ways - 1. Encapsulate bittorrent in SSL over plain port-80 HTTP. 2. Either randomize or approximate flow pattern of any legit application that would be way too painful for any ISP to block.
The sheer scale of false positives, bad vibes, pissed customers and support load an ISP would encounter from any form of selective blocking of high-profile legit customer data will make it totally impractical to do.
Who the hell's looking at (malpractice suits)/(total expenditures)? In what way is the amount of money obtained via malpractice suits indicative of anything? At best it is some distant semi-obfuscated gauge of what insurance costs might resemble in an open insurance market. From a documentary I've seen lately (I can't cite unfortunately), US practitioners were complaining of impossible insurance tariffs stemming from a tendency of the public to litigate over everything imaginable and then some. This is not an indication that the courts are helpless idiots, and perhaps the US courts have more sense (or more experience handling sue-over-anything bastards) than Canadian courts do, thus affecting the payout bottom line in favor of the US.
My point stands though.
I'm talking about high insurance premiums whose costs, since a medical practice is a business that needs to turn a profit, are rolled onto the customer. EVERY customer. The actual money obtained by those who sue is irrelevant, as they themselves are an irrelevant minority. The high healthcare costs everyone has to pay, on the other hand, stemming from the high costs all doctors have to pay, stemming NOT from the money courts made doctors pay plaintiffs and YES from what insurance companies demanded to insure doctors indirectly related to metrics only one of which is payoffs (others may be number of court cases, legal expenses and other pain for insurance companies that does not reflect in plaintiff settlements but does reflect on their bottom line).
No, insurance is not the sole and only component of that even if it is not a myth as you seem to imply (weird, as I've seen you post other stuff around, and usually you seem more informed.
And the fact that your government would rather spend money on getting people hurt in Iraq rather than spending it on getting people hurt less in the continental US is another (read: better subsidized public healthcare, like they do in first-world countries), but that's a whole different story.
The bottom line is that the underlying cause is not technical, it's mentality. As such, it doesn't apply to everyone, but it does apply to enough people in a society to significantly affect how it behaves. And yours behaves in a way that is causing the healthcare issue at hand.
What you need is to cope with the fact you live in a society where litigation is the national pastime, sport, hobby and status symbol all rolled into one.
Prices of US healthcare merely reflect that, and as long as litigation stays an integral part of your national mentality, the price/performance rating of your health-care system isn't going anywhere.
After all, your powers-that-be need to keep those insurance industry margins safe.
Pardon my French, but where in that first link you said that says "Not it isn't" (a crime) does it say that copyright infringement is not a crime? I haven't found that bit.
And obfuscating it further will help what exactly? I agree with the grandparent that tag info is/not/ a watermark. If it is, is including your email in the filename a watermark too? Is placing a (separate) file with your email on a CD with aac files a watermark? Is just printing your name on the CD? Is printing it on a jewel case? All we're doing is playing around (deliberately to the absurd in my example) with what we consider the black box we wish to consider "the content in question". Is it the jewelcase and all that is inside? Is it the CD? The iso? Directory? file? aac stream?
Is the meaning of "watermarking" a function of how dumb consumers are, thus incapable of grokking what lays beneath the file layer? The answer, in case you haven't figured out, is NO.
It's a slippery slope you're jumping on, and there's nothing but useless terms too meaningless to be of any use at the bottom. Just drags us one step closer to an idiocracy.
I don't see why we need to dumb our language down to the lowest common denominator. It may be you prefer to do things in the US, I think it's outright idiocy. Do we need to start giving "detergent" or "carbon" a new meaning because the average person is clueless in chemistry? No. You either talk the talk or accept the definitions of people who do.
Watermarking refers to embedding data in the media data. Appended stuff that is meaningless in the context of the data is just that. Appended stuff. Think back to where watermarking came from - marking paper. Would scribbling a note (on the same piece of paper, at the bottom) with your name on it constitute a watermark? No. The "water" in "watermark" has a reason for being there - to lay the extra data *on top* of the existing document.
Ever heard of Socket-478-Mobile (not to be confused with the old P4-socket-478) desktop motherboards?
T5x00 and T7x00 CPUs are almost equivalent to E4x00/6x00 desktop CPUs performancewise and have a TDP of ~30 Watts (they lag a bit on the FSB, but we're not comparing to enthusiast monsters, the CPUs in question have big caches and are otherwise very powerful and can easily power gaming rigs, video compression etc). I'm writing this on one in fact).
Unlike the AMD 30 Watt parts, they're not vaporware - they're present in retail and in most laptops (and some desktops too).
Further, L7x00 CPUs that are already appearing on the market in lappies halve that figure (17W) and still come in PGA socket form factor (ie can be used in desktops easily enough), and U7x00 which halve it again (9W) may also come in PGA. The lower power, the lower you'll find the clock-speed range, but even the lowest-of-the-low CPUs such as the Core-based Celeron 423 (Core 1 Solo 1.06GHz) can easily power standard desktop systems, and consume an entire 5 Watts.
And if you can put your own system together, you can probably cool an L7x00 and maybe even with a bit of effort a T5x00/T7x00 using passive cooling (Ninja Scythe minus fan or some such). Lose the fan - save another watt or two:-)
So even if your power savings using a lower-power CPU over a high-power one amount to the cost of powering the CPU for 2-3 years rather than 1 year, my point stands. If there's no noticeable benefit, why pay the money?
btw, my next gaming rig will be built around this concept (with some kind of depowering scheme for the GPU I haven't figured out yet)
The reason nobody buys AMD is because the delta in power consumption of an AMD CPU over a year compared to a similar core-based CPU is more expensive than the cost of the CPU itself.
In that case it may be my reading comprehension that is lacking. I thought we were talking about using phones in cars with handsfree tools vs completely disallowing usage of phones in cars (a somewhat draconian measure that technology in TFA would cater to enforcing). My bad.
>> but you've not made and real argument for why handsfree is any different than non-handsfree I've also not commented on putting whales on the moon. I was not debating the merits of the hansfree (I'm of the same opinion as you on that topic, due to the exact logic we've discussed). Rather, I was simply putting an argument why absolute banning of cellular devices in cars and punishing any driver whose car has an active cellular device transmitting from it is not a good idea.
From what you're saying (as opposed to what I earlier thought you were saying), and from what I am saying (as opposed to what you thought earlier I was saying), we're not actually disagreeing on anything.
>> You said you would support x but not y, where x and y are of equal danger in terms of (lack of) driving safety. That's telling HALF the story.
The other half is that the decision on whether to accept a certain technology dangerous to a certain extent lies not only with the danger it introduces, but also with the benefit it brings.
Your utterly lala-land claim that "danger" is the only parameter than requires assessing to grant judgement, and lack of will to discuss trivial things such as "benefit" is what I attacked, not you in person. Quit whining and address what you're asked to address.
I deliberately gave an extreme case - the use of cars - that makes a very clear case study that benefit can make things worth it even in spite of them being dangerous. You waived it away as a "social inertia" thing, as if we really want to abolish them, but people won't agree (to a neutral person that would spell that you're in a minority on that account). It's not social inertia mate. It's simply worth the risk. Don't think so? go live where there are no cars.
>> I'm trying to suggest that as a pragmatic approach, we do the same with a newly introduced behavior that approximates that same level of increased danger.
But NOT the same level of benefit to society, which places that behavior in a totally different spot on the "benefit/cost" scale to drunk driving.
>> This makes no sense. You seem to be wildly incapable of digesting any opinion but your own.
Thing is, studies suggest driving causes tens of thousands of deaths annually worldwide. We have, as a society. 100 years ago almost no one drove, and we managed. Making driving illegal would likely not cause such tremendous undue burden (you can *always* walk).
I think the acceptance of driving is due to an ignorance of how dangerous it can be, not due to an informed decision that our desire for an increasing GNP is worth a driving level of danger.
To reiterate my point, making handsfree-devices legal is a pragmatic compromise. Driving, but with regulated traffic laws (rather than without most of them, as would have been the case 100 years ago) is a pragmatic compromise. I'm happier living in a society that endorses pragmatic compromises and gets the majority of the benefit of both extremes rather than one that forces down one of the extremes on everyone because lawmakers and the public are so polarized in their opinion and incapable of seeing things in either black or white.
I'm perfectly happy with handset-while-driving=illegal, handsfree-while-driving=legal, even if there is an increased risk. Following your approach of dangerous=>let's-ban! , we should also ban in-car stereo, radio, make sound-proof glass between driver and passengers mandatory, ban freeways and make the max speed limit everywhere about 20km/h. ALL of the above proven causes of accidents. There! No more risk! Is that where you'd want to be living?
You're right on with the other two, but driving automobiles is just as dangerous as driving them around with cell phone communicating from the car. It might be legal, but that is because of poorly-written laws, not due to any extra safety from using hands-free.
Point in case being just because something is dangerous doesn't mean it MUST be a bad thing and laws must be put in place to prevent it. Everything carries some danger factor, which must be weighed against the benefits.
The ability to get quickly from one point to another is something our economies are based on and would be impractical to outlaw without an alternate means to move around. So we accept the benefit alongside the danger. Ready communications is rapidly becoming that as well.
Rather than polarize everything into good and evil, you need to start thinking along more pragmatic cost vs benefit lines. Banning all communications from automobiles strikes me as sheer stupidity.
You seem to be sharing the common misconception that LEO altitudes and above cannot be reached at low speeds.
Dude, you can reach an altitude of 330 miles just fine with a perfectly low speed. There's nothing unphysical about it that requires the invocation of holy cows. It is also true that with the lack of a *horizontal* velocity of about mach 30 (at ~100km, you'd need less if you get as far as 330 miles high), you fall back down (well, not back to the same place, you may have traveled halfway around the world by then, but still, back *down*) like a rock. This is what spaceship-1 did, this is what this experiment did. This is what ICBM's do. This is even what proposed "2-hour-sydney-to-london" flights will do. Speed is only needed to get into low orbit. They go high, fast enough to stay in space for the duration of cruising their trajectory, without air resistance and at pretty dang fast speed, then they just drop back into the atmpsphere.
Nothing to get overly excited about. The concept was already proven to work, and we haven't reached a point where the technology is generating value yet, so it's all still technological limbo. Not that it wouldn't be nice if it actually got done after 20 years of R&D. Shorter times for less fuel would pro'lly mean many more flights in lifetime of aircraft, less fuel burned, less time-in-air per trip, more in-range accessible destination for carriers and while I haven't the slightest clue as to what operational costs on scramjet-based planes would look like, it would seem to have the potential to cheapen things from where they are today.
Already doing that. My other computer is an ultraportable dual-core T-5600-based Thinkpad X60.
Point is, my requirement is a bit different.
I game on an off, which is to say for 3 months I don't touch computers when I'm in school, then for 3 more I do some gaming. Cheaper (and nicer) to buy a graphics card for those months, then sell it off before the next semester. A proven way of getting a better academic record too;-)
Still, I don't want to disassemble the entire desktop rig each time, and in school-era I want it to be a no-moving-parts box. This also means running its OS from a big&cheap CF card (and NAS for some stuff), careful choice of components and alternating between an tiny picoPSU-120 during peacetime to fuel the rig and a monster PSU for when a GPU monstrosity is present.
Slashdot Mirror
Google's shit isn't *on by default* on new OS installs.
Installing it is a conscious choice.
As long as Microsoft keeps to that, I'm perfectly fine with them offering this, just as I was with Google Desktop.
The problem lies in the fact that Microsoft has been notoriously known to put this kind of stuff into default installs, which is where I shudder, and people at google look at themselves in the mirror and ask "OMG, What have we done?! Sure, *we* do no evil, but others with our ideas?"
Yes and no.
We're both suggesting the same be done, only you're discussing what I suggested be "Phase B" (suggesting doing everything in a single phase), whereas I was suggesting the trivial bit that would rake in a substantial part of the benefits be done first and soon, and the more elaborate part regarding how this tag propagates to derived works be worked up in a later revision.
I'd rather the former be available at t=1 and the latter at t=3 than all of it be available at t=2.5
As an interesting sidenote, I haven't examined the recent itunes tags (the very talked-about apple-publicizing with-your-email unencrypted tags), but do they in any form
[a] contain some kind of checksum of the audio stream in the aac file in question?
[b] contain any mention of the actual copyright holder? (not to be confused with artist, which is doubtlessly there...)
>> In a sense, you need to break free from the idea of digital signatures, except for signing the data in the tag itself.
Yes, and if pigs could fly.
Since
[a] Most media uses lossy codecs that effectively modify the core data in question
[b] You're designing this for future lossy codecs that are not invented yet.
I'd be happy if we had said signed id3 tags on the exact-md5-originals, since that is something we *can do right now*, and add additional possibly dodgy (false-positives-wise) stuff for derivate recoded versions later, given we can get it to work.
I'd rather not hang the easily-done former by our (debatable) (future) ability to achieve the latter.
I don't support the notion that says "The wright brothers should never have invented something less than a Boeing 747". If they'd have had to start that high, we wouldn't be flying. Introduce the first level of useful tech, then evolve it with time. The everything-or-nothing approach is the worst enemy of getting anything out the door.
What you need is a signed id3 tag with that info, not DRM. ID3 tags containing an md5sum of the work (audio track, ebook, jpeg, what have you).
Preferrably, appended to the file itself, so when the file makes the rounds, so does the copyright holder information.
Further, this should be made *MANDATORY* by law on any electronic work that claims copyright.
This would be a very good thing for all except the MAFIAA -
It would serve several causes:
1. It would paint a big mother of a "SUE ME" target on the forehead of any publishing house attempting copyfraud.
2. Indy artists, listen carefully: this would allow anyone to easily get in touch (read: PAY) with the copyright holder.
A signed, reliable and easily-verifyable-by-joe-consumer link to a direct-to-artist
Paypal account, directly in the id3. This would serve to maximize goodwill payment by a nontrivial subgroup of sharers who do want to pay the artists, quite possibly live elsewhere in the world where US copyright law is the least of their worries, and simply do not want their money to end up in the wrong hands.
(Same thing in non-signed and non-easily-verifyable id3 tags is simply an invitation for "nigerian" fraud).
3. In a small sense this would also be good for the MAFIAA (it would make it easier for people to legally license something they want to use, thus increasing the percentage of people who actually do so, however, this may or may not (pro'lly not) be offset by the fact that item [2] above may lose them money by circumventing them and [1] may lose them money for works they are currently profiting off copyfraud from.
Oh oh, now you've done it.
My lawyers are on their way, seeing as I've recently Copyrighted Christmas! (and all Xmas-type derivates...)
Better start paying me royalties or else!
Maybe not fair, but at least in a morally defendable one, and one that serves as a positive force elsewhere (pulling countries like China UP - better human rights - rather than pushing the US down).
Those that employ Hammer-Engineers and Screwdriver-Engineers, as opposed to those who employ carpenters.
... "3, but I've been a sysadmin for 15 and did other backup software etc etc..", "No, we're looking for a Veritas Netbackup Engineer who did this for at least 5 years". These people see me as a junior netbackup "engineer" of 3 year experience and lots of totally irrelevant other history. As far as they care, I could have been shoveling shit for the rest of my career, it wouldn't matter. They can't see the relevance.
I'm in the same spot you are. I'm a coder, a sysadmin, I do server support, desktop support, network support, firewalls, routers, topology planning, you name it. Geek through and through.
My experience teaches me I'll NEVER be happy in a place that hires Hammer Engineers. Why? for one thing, because I'd be undervalued from day one ("How many years of experience do you have managing Veritas Netbackup?"
Now, if by any odd fate you'd end up working there, you'd be sitting among people who made a career of running Netbackup, or Solstice Disksuite, or BMC, or notepad, or whatever. People the majority of whom cannot manage their own windows box. People who don't meddle and tweak and experiment what they're given to, seeing themselves as specialists in their field and knowing nothing but ("You're a SOLARIS administrator! WHY are you wasting your time on practicing your coding skills?!")
This is, of course, an extreme case, but it's a real-life one I've worked on and hated every second.
Contributing factors are size of company, non-technical management (the level of management directly responsible for hiring the tech people, not senior management) that have limited capability of gouging how well a candidate fits a role other than by narrowing down the scope of the role to something their non-technical minds can grasp and putting a numeric estimate (# of years experience) on that. Companies with high employee turnover rates that use these narrow-scope-job-roles to easily replace people, etc.
I'm not an Open Source fanboy. I'm pragmatic both ends of the divide, and am just as good using paid solutions as unpaid ones. I'm for *thinking*, then doing what's best. These hammer-engineer-hiring companies typically stay away from the thinking bit, some having policies dictated by FUD-overfed clueless management. When I mentioned simple solutions like using some Open Source tools, I ran into a fucking concrete wall, just making me more frustrated.
I've since moved to a company that hires carpenters. ONLY carpenters. When I hit here, there were 3 of us taking care of a 300-odd-employee organization, ~100-200 servers, 3 int'l subsidiaries, and everything from PABX to desktops to servers. Needless to say, all three of us were complete JOAT's that had the required skills to put into production anything the organization required, given access to google, the net, and a reasonable amount of time to learn and implement the topic.
We've since become 8 people, and being a Jack-of-All-Trades is the only way one would ever get to work here. The sysadmins code, the coders can do their [linux!] desktop box without desktop support changing their diapers.
This kind of employer is YOUR home court. Whereas you would almost always be undervalued, underpromoted and underpaid at the former kind, here you are valued significantly higher than a specialized candidate. Needless to say, the proximity of likeminded individuals will very simply and in the most literal sense, make your work really really fun.
If I had a gazillion dollars, I'd quit my former job, yet I would keep working at this one because I enjoy it.
To narrow down the places you want to be looking for, look for the following:
1. Places that are not afraid to use open-source. More often then not (obviously not always) this requires people who "know their shit" to properly piece together and manage.
When I was looking for a job, I found the following search criteria to plug into job-ad searches to
|sed 's/80/443/'
Bittorrent (or the next generation of P2P, be that whatever) will simply adjust.
I can think offhand of at least two simple ways -
1. Encapsulate bittorrent in SSL over plain port-80 HTTP.
2. Either randomize or approximate flow pattern of any legit application that would be way too painful for any ISP to block.
The sheer scale of false positives, bad vibes, pissed customers and support load an ISP would encounter from any form of selective blocking of high-profile legit customer data will make it totally impractical to do.
Ok, I'll bite.
It's a free market. Competition yada yada.
Why the excessive cost then?
Who the hell's looking at (malpractice suits)/(total expenditures)? In what way is the amount of money obtained via malpractice suits indicative of anything? At best it is some distant semi-obfuscated gauge of what insurance costs might resemble in an open insurance market. From a documentary I've seen lately (I can't cite unfortunately), US practitioners were complaining of impossible insurance tariffs stemming from a tendency of the public to litigate over everything imaginable and then some. This is not an indication that the courts are helpless idiots, and perhaps the US courts have more sense (or more experience handling sue-over-anything bastards) than Canadian courts do, thus affecting the payout bottom line in favor of the US.
My point stands though.
I'm talking about high insurance premiums whose costs, since a medical practice is a business that needs to turn a profit, are rolled onto the customer. EVERY customer. The actual money obtained by those who sue is irrelevant, as they themselves are an irrelevant minority. The high healthcare costs everyone has to pay, on the other hand, stemming from the high costs all doctors have to pay, stemming NOT from the money courts made doctors pay plaintiffs and YES from what insurance companies demanded to insure doctors indirectly related to metrics only one of which is payoffs (others may be number of court cases, legal expenses and other pain for insurance companies that does not reflect in plaintiff settlements but does reflect on their bottom line).
No, insurance is not the sole and only component of that even if it is not a myth as you seem to imply (weird, as I've seen you post other stuff around, and usually you seem more informed.
And the fact that your government would rather spend money on getting people hurt in Iraq rather than spending it on getting people hurt less in the continental US is another (read: better subsidized public healthcare, like they do in first-world countries), but that's a whole different story.
The bottom line is that the underlying cause is not technical, it's mentality. As such, it doesn't apply to everyone, but it does apply to enough people in a society to significantly affect how it behaves. And yours behaves in a way that is causing the healthcare issue at hand.
What you need is to cope with the fact you live in a society where litigation is the national pastime, sport, hobby and status symbol all rolled into one.
Prices of US healthcare merely reflect that, and as long as litigation stays an integral part of your national mentality, the price/performance rating of your health-care system isn't going anywhere.
After all, your powers-that-be need to keep those insurance industry margins safe.
Pardon my French, but where in that first link you said that says "Not it isn't" (a crime) does it say that copyright infringement is not a crime? I haven't found that bit.
And obfuscating it further will help what exactly? /not/ a watermark.
I agree with the grandparent that tag info is
If it is, is including your email in the filename a watermark too? Is placing a (separate) file with your email on a CD with aac files a watermark? Is just printing your name on the CD? Is printing it on a jewel case? All we're doing is playing around (deliberately to the absurd in my example) with what we consider the black box we wish to consider "the content in question". Is it the jewelcase and all that is inside? Is it the CD? The iso? Directory? file? aac stream?
Is the meaning of "watermarking" a function of how dumb consumers are, thus incapable of grokking what lays beneath the file layer? The answer, in case you haven't figured out, is NO.
It's a slippery slope you're jumping on, and there's nothing but useless terms too meaningless to be of any use at the bottom. Just drags us one step closer to an idiocracy.
I don't see why we need to dumb our language down to the lowest common denominator. It may be you prefer to do things in the US, I think it's outright idiocy. Do we need to start giving "detergent" or "carbon" a new meaning because the average person is clueless in chemistry? No. You either talk the talk or accept the definitions of people who do.
Watermarking refers to embedding data in the media data. Appended stuff that is meaningless in the context of the data is just that. Appended stuff. Think back to where watermarking came from - marking paper. Would scribbling a note (on the same piece of paper, at the bottom) with your name on it constitute a watermark? No. The "water" in "watermark" has a reason for being there - to lay the extra data *on top* of the existing document.
>> while the lowest Intel can produce is 65W.
:-)
Ever heard of Socket-478-Mobile (not to be confused with the old P4-socket-478) desktop motherboards?
T5x00 and T7x00 CPUs are almost equivalent to E4x00/6x00 desktop CPUs performancewise and have a TDP of ~30 Watts (they lag a bit on the FSB, but we're not comparing to enthusiast monsters, the CPUs in question have big caches and are otherwise very powerful and can easily power gaming rigs, video compression etc). I'm writing this on one in fact).
Unlike the AMD 30 Watt parts, they're not vaporware - they're present in retail and in most laptops (and some desktops too).
Further, L7x00 CPUs that are already appearing on the market in lappies halve that figure (17W) and still come in PGA socket form factor (ie can be used in desktops easily enough), and U7x00 which halve it again (9W) may also come in PGA. The lower power, the lower you'll find the clock-speed range, but even the lowest-of-the-low CPUs such as the Core-based Celeron 423 (Core 1 Solo 1.06GHz) can easily power standard desktop systems, and consume an entire 5 Watts.
Do some homework - here link, knock yourself out
And if you can put your own system together, you can probably cool an L7x00 and maybe even with a bit of effort a T5x00/T7x00 using passive cooling (Ninja Scythe minus fan or some such). Lose the fan - save another watt or two
So even if your power savings using a lower-power CPU over a high-power one amount to the cost of powering the CPU for 2-3 years rather than 1 year, my point stands. If there's no noticeable benefit, why pay the money?
btw, my next gaming rig will be built around this concept (with some kind of depowering scheme for the GPU I haven't figured out yet)
The reason nobody buys AMD is because the delta in power consumption of an AMD CPU over a year compared to a similar core-based CPU is more expensive than the cost of the CPU itself.
In that case it may be my reading comprehension that is lacking. I thought we were talking about using phones in cars with handsfree tools vs completely disallowing usage of phones in cars (a somewhat draconian measure that technology in TFA would cater to enforcing). My bad.
>> but you've not made and real argument for why handsfree is any different than non-handsfree
I've also not commented on putting whales on the moon. I was not debating the merits of the hansfree (I'm of the same opinion as you on that topic, due to the exact logic we've discussed). Rather, I was simply putting an argument why absolute banning of cellular devices in cars and punishing any driver whose car has an active cellular device transmitting from it is not a good idea.
From what you're saying (as opposed to what I earlier thought you were saying), and from what I am saying (as opposed to what you thought earlier I was saying), we're not actually disagreeing on anything.
MOD PARENT UP
>> You said you would support x but not y, where x and y are of equal danger in terms of (lack of) driving safety.
That's telling HALF the story.
The other half is that the decision on whether to accept a certain technology dangerous to a certain extent lies not only with the danger it introduces, but also with the benefit it brings.
Your utterly lala-land claim that "danger" is the only parameter than requires assessing to grant judgement, and lack of will to discuss trivial things such as "benefit" is what I attacked, not you in person. Quit whining and address what you're asked to address.
I deliberately gave an extreme case - the use of cars - that makes a very clear case study that benefit can make things worth it even in spite of them being dangerous. You waived it away as a "social inertia" thing, as if we really want to abolish them, but people won't agree (to a neutral person that would spell that you're in a minority on that account). It's not social inertia mate. It's simply worth the risk. Don't think so? go live where there are no cars.
>> I'm trying to suggest that as a pragmatic approach, we do the same with a newly introduced behavior that approximates that same level of increased danger.
But NOT the same level of benefit to society, which places that behavior in a totally different spot on the "benefit/cost" scale to drunk driving.
>> This makes no sense.
You seem to be wildly incapable of digesting any opinion but your own.
Thing is, studies suggest driving causes tens of thousands of deaths annually worldwide. We have, as a society. 100 years ago almost no one drove, and we managed. Making driving illegal would likely not cause such tremendous undue burden (you can *always* walk).
I think the acceptance of driving is due to an ignorance of how dangerous it can be, not due to an informed decision that our desire for an increasing GNP is worth a driving level of danger.
To reiterate my point, making handsfree-devices legal is a pragmatic compromise. Driving, but with regulated traffic laws (rather than without most of them, as would have been the case 100 years ago) is a pragmatic compromise. I'm happier living in a society that endorses pragmatic compromises and gets the majority of the benefit of both extremes rather than one that forces down one of the extremes on everyone because lawmakers and the public are so polarized in their opinion and incapable of seeing things in either black or white.
I'm perfectly happy with handset-while-driving=illegal, handsfree-while-driving=legal, even if there is an increased risk. Following your approach of dangerous=>let's-ban! , we should also ban in-car stereo, radio, make sound-proof glass between driver and passengers mandatory, ban freeways and make the max speed limit everywhere about 20km/h. ALL of the above proven causes of accidents. There! No more risk! Is that where you'd want to be living?
You're right on with the other two, but driving automobiles is just as dangerous as driving them around with cell phone communicating from the car. It might be legal, but that is because of poorly-written laws, not due to any extra safety from using hands-free.
Point in case being just because something is dangerous doesn't mean it MUST be a bad thing and laws must be put in place to prevent it. Everything carries some danger factor, which must be weighed against the benefits.
The ability to get quickly from one point to another is something our economies are based on and would be impractical to outlaw without an alternate means to move around. So we accept the benefit alongside the danger. Ready communications is rapidly becoming that as well.
Rather than polarize everything into good and evil, you need to start thinking along more pragmatic cost vs benefit lines. Banning all communications from automobiles strikes me as sheer stupidity.
"Ah like money..."
You seem to be sharing the common misconception that LEO altitudes and above cannot be reached at low speeds.
Dude, you can reach an altitude of 330 miles just fine with a perfectly low speed. There's nothing unphysical about it that requires the invocation of holy cows. It is also true that with the lack of a *horizontal* velocity of about mach 30 (at ~100km, you'd need less if you get as far as 330 miles high), you fall back down (well, not back to the same place, you may have traveled halfway around the world by then, but still, back *down*) like a rock. This is what spaceship-1 did, this is what this experiment did. This is what ICBM's do. This is even what proposed "2-hour-sydney-to-london" flights will do. Speed is only needed to get into low orbit.
They go high, fast enough to stay in space for the duration of cruising their trajectory, without air resistance and at pretty dang fast speed, then they just drop back into the atmpsphere.
Nothing to get overly excited about. The concept was already proven to work, and we haven't reached a point where the technology is generating value yet, so it's all still technological limbo. Not that it wouldn't be nice if it actually got done after 20 years of R&D. Shorter times for less fuel would pro'lly mean many more flights in lifetime of aircraft, less fuel burned, less time-in-air per trip, more in-range accessible destination for carriers and while I haven't the slightest clue as to what operational costs on scramjet-based planes would look like, it would seem to have the potential to cheapen things from where they are today.
Already doing that.
;-)
My other computer is an ultraportable dual-core T-5600-based Thinkpad X60.
Point is, my requirement is a bit different.
I game on an off, which is to say for 3 months I don't touch computers when I'm in school, then for 3 more I do some gaming. Cheaper (and nicer) to buy a graphics card for those months, then sell it off before the next semester. A proven way of getting a better academic record too
Still, I don't want to disassemble the entire desktop rig each time, and in school-era I want it to be a no-moving-parts box. This also means running its OS from a big&cheap CF card (and NAS for some stuff), careful choice of components and alternating between an tiny picoPSU-120 during peacetime to fuel the rig and a monster PSU for when a GPU monstrosity is present.