Worthless as in "not cost effective to launch back to earth orbit", yes. After all, at least in the short to medium term, your potential customers will require any poducts to be delivered to GEO and below.
The main problem here is the lack of rocket fuel (i.e. volatiles) on the moon, which, besides being a very attractive product in its own right, ATM is the only way to get something out of the moon's gravity well, as more effective engine types (ion, plasma, solar thermal, etc.) are not suitable to provide the necessary thrust for launch (while they would be perfectly viable to transport stuff to and from astroids).
The availability of a lunar based mass driver and the existence of customers at the earth-moon lagrange points might eventually change the picture, but not any time soon. Until then, you have to bring along all your fuel from earth. Helium-3 is pretty much the only ressource which would be worth the hassle, IF ways can be found to mine it in significant quantities AND to use it as fusion fuel (again, not likely to happen any time soon).
> We will eventually need access to both resources,
agreed
> but it will probably be easier to first establish > a presence on the moon than on one or more asteroids.
Not if the goal is to bootstrap an (enonomically) self-sustaining process. It might make sense as a "training camp" for mars, but while this is a viable scientific / political goal, it does not help to bring along a new space "gold rush".
Forgetting one moment about the ridiculous time schedule (17 years with current technology after Apollo took less than 10 years after starting virtually from scratch half a century ago is simply embarrassing), the question remains what to do up there besides scientific explorations. The Moon is basically a pile of worthless dirt: Light crust material with all the volatiles gassed out.
Going after astroids is both cheaper (in terms of delta-v) and more interesting economically: You have anything from volatile rich comets to core material iron/nickel balls in all different sizes and at delta-vs as low as several hundred m/s from HEO (as compared to 2 x 1.4 km/s for the moon). Also, a zero gravity enviroment has many advantages for processing, requires less structural support (e.g. for solar pannels and mirrors) and makes it easy to move heavy stuff around.
After all, if you're serious about developing a permanent space presence, you will need some sort of space industry which is easier to bootstrap from astroids than on the moon.
I think that, by default, all information should go to the public domain after a fairly short period of, say 5 years after publication. The duration has to be less than the typical half-life period of the media and data formats involved, otherwise stuff can too easily get lost before it gets legal to shift to and distribute in current data formats. After all, getting more stuff eventually into the public domain IS the stated purpose of copyright law.
If someone wishes to retain copyright privileges for a longer time, say up to 25 years after publication, which is half the current limit and more than enough to allow the author (in reality: the media companies) for reasonable compensation, then it should be required to submit the work in a specified digital format to a public database which is there to make sure that the work is readily available to the public after the copyright has expired.
The cost for such a database could be covered by a yearly fee from the copyright holders. After all, they get a prolonged state sanctioned monopoly over the work at the expense of everyone else. It's only fair for society to expect something in return. Also, the existence of such a database would greatly simplify the resolvment of legal issues in the enforcement of the granted monopoly.
A customizable BIOS with the Kernel in flash would be the proper place to setup user authentication, software harddisk encryption, firewall rules and VPNs. If supported by the kernel (AFAIK OpenBSD has such a feature; don't know about Linux), you could switch the OS into a secure mode after boot up and initialization where it is no longer possible to change certain settings before you even access the harddrive.
It's basically as close as you can get to "tamper-proof" by a software-only approach and for notebooks, it would provide some reasonable theft protection, esp. if combined with a "this notebook is the property of....." banner on startup and some epoxy over the bios flash rom...
It your "innovation" can be split into two parts, one part of which is a data medium an the other part is an information processing device which does not infringe on the claimed patent, then the combination of the two is not liable for patent protection.
An easier way would be to simply state that the content of a data carrier such as a dvd or a book can never consitute patent infringement, regardless of your claim.
Obviously, when a machine with no auditing features is used in an election, there's a very high chance that whoever ordered or built said machine did so with the purpose of being able to manipulating the result. But that's not the only and not even the worst problem.
While the manipulation problem can be fixed by generating a voter-verifyable paper trail (NOT an easy problem, but doable), this still leaves us with the harder problem of secrecy (or potential lack thereof).
A voter who enters his decision into an electronic black box can never be sure that his vote is not secretly recorded and used against him later. The problem here is not only that this actually happens, the rumour that it MIGHT happen is already enough to make a free election impossible.
This is *not* a Video card with an FPGA, this is an FPGA-card with Video-out capabilities; that is: a customary programmable FPGA board at the price of a mid-range Graphic card. The VGA-core (2D or 3D doesn't matter a bit) is really nothing more than a demo application and probably the first thing which gets replaced when this baby is put to the use it is meant for: video- and signal processing, I/O+control applications and custom hardware acceleration (crypto, compression, ECC/FEC, you name it...).
See that I can plug in a camera and those video pattern-recognition tasks which now require custom built DSP- or FPGA-boards can suddenly be run on commodity hardware. Attach a micropohone, and we're talking about next generation PC speech recognition. Add some spare I/O-pins and get 1us response times for your hard-realtime applications by "hard-wiring" critical IRQ-handlers on the FPGA.
The potential for bringing FPGAs to the PC mass market is HUGE and even more so in the context of OpenSource. Once supported by the OS, resource demanding programs might ship with their own FPGA acceleration modules. This product might have the potential of becoming the standard for this new technology.
The idea of patents is to compensate innovators by temproarily restricting the freedom of all members of the jurististiction to which it applies, to take advantage of a fact (the invention), such that the original finder of that fact can make money, either by exploiting the fact itself or by charging others for the right to do so.
(Useful) facts are very much like real estate: You can only exercise you property right by limiting the rights of others. In any free society, you need a good reason for restricting the rights of the public; in the case of patents, this is done to compensate the inventor (the original finder of the fact) and thereby spur innovation. If patents aren't used to that end (and in the case of software patents, they rarely are), then they are damaging to society.
So what we need is a scheme, that encourages patents only if they are actually used to make money by making the benefits of the invention available to the public. This simplest way to do this is a price-dependent tax on patents.
Whoever wants to file a patent has to put a price tag to it, for which is is willing to sell out his patent to the public domain. He is completly free by selecting this price. However, to uphold his patent, he has to pay an annual fee of, say 1%, of this buy-out price. The price can be adapeted yearly but only in a range of, say, +/- 25%. If, during the runtime of the patent, anyone pays the patent holder the buy-out price, then the patent enters the public domain immediately.
If the patent is any good and actually used to produce goods or give away licences, 1% is a rather small amount. If its only used as a lockaway patent, to hinder innovation, protect an obsolete business model or as a weapon in court, then it is expensive, as it doesn't generate any direct revenue.
I understand that firefox has popups suppressed by default which is a good thing. Why on earth, there is no simple way to suppress the (firefox-made) popups trying to ask me if I want to download fancy XY-plungin for the 100th time? If you have to, add an extra "No, but please keep asking me over and over" button, but by default, one "No" per plugin type should be enough not to ever be bothered with shockwave et al. again.
> I was thinking more along the lines of bringing it in the traditional way that the space shuttle does, i.e. in liquid form in tanks.
If you have to bring along the oxygen anyway, then this wouldn't be too helpful: 1 kg of oxygen can burn no more than 300g of kerosin, so more than 3/4 of the fuel would have to be LOX, anyway.
Also, the hydrogen would have to be compressed, befor it can be burned by conventional rocket engines. Also, a rocket is only effective if it accellerates at several g's, as the portion of thrust used to merely balance earth's gravity doesn't add to the kinetic energy of the vehicle and is basically lost; the drag of the balloon's hull would make this an impossibilty.
So you would have to deflate the balloon and compress the hydrogen into a compact tank befor you can fire the engines, all of this in a matter of seconds, as you are getting into free fall once you start the deflation.
Thanks for mentioning QCL! After all, QCL has already been around for 3 years as the first version of the above article appeared in March 2001 and the QC-lib (libqc), a C++ library comparable to the QRAM lib, which now serves as the simulation back-end of the QCL interpreter dates back to 1996.
Another way to play around with nonclassical algorithms and get your feet wet with quantum programming would be QCL.
QCL is a procedural quantum programming language which provides nonclassical language elements such as unitary operators, running code in reverse, scratch space management, etc. A Linux interpreter (GPL) which simulates a quantum computer with an arbitrary number of qubits is available here.
Problem is, hunting them down and bringing them to trial/applying the framework of international law/etc etc etc is nothing more than laughable weakness to these people
That's beside the point: It is of no importance what it means to them. Not playing by your own rules demonstrates that you think that these very rules (the law, international treaties, etc.) are laughable. The willingness to throw those principles overboard while claiming to defend them is the real sign of weakness. By doing that, you are acually conceding defeat. Of course, the same principle also applies to all restrictions of freedom you are willing to accept for the illusion of security.
However, in the meantime this particular enemy has demonstrated just how far it is willing to go. Would they use nuclear weapons or biologicals? Can you imagine for a second that they wouldn't?
They will, and basically there's not much you can do to prevent this, except finding those very people befor they act. But I doubt that 4 carrier groups and >700 planes will be of any good to acheive that goal. On the contrary: the resulting collateral damage - not in terms of innocent victims, but in terms of induced hate and additional people willing to commit there lives to terrorism - will make things worse even if you choose to ignore any ethical concerns.
There's a time for the legal framework and a time to go out and kill certain people who represent a direct threat to public safety.
The problem is finding those people. Once you know who and where they are, it costs you nothing to at last try to arrest them (and shoot them if they don't comply) and thus play by the rules. And if you don't know who and where they are, then any military effort is useless, anyway.
I think that the political situation in Pakistan is an even greater danger - not only to the success of the retaliation mission - but to the stability in the whole region.
Remember that the Pakistan government had to be "convinced" by an US ultimatum to join the anti-Taliban coalition and have no reason to particularily like the US because of the (now lifted) sanctions. If inner state opposition - let alone a civil war - causes a change in Pakistan policy, then the US troops who might use the land as a staging area for the upcoming operation - will be in real trouble.
I'm from Europe, and even here - acoording to the latest gallup poll - 80% of the population is against a miltary US punitive expedition (and yes, it is viewed as a punitive expedition as the US didn't even bother to negotiate, get a full UN mandate, or at least show some proof of Bin Laden's guilt, as they would have to do in any proper extradition process) - extrapolate that to a muslimic country and you might get an inpression on how thin the ice really is.
As for my personal opinion: I think that the whole rethoric of war is misguided: Terror is basically organised crime (with the objective of killing people rather than making money) - or does the US really think that the suicide pilots qualify as soldiers? I guess that would do them too much honor.
This should really be a matter of the courts, the police, the CIA and - if necessary - a military police operation to get hold of the suspects after all proof is on the table. This is how crime is handled in a constitutional state and I think the US owes it to itself to play by its own rules here, esp. because - as the only remaining superpower - it can get anway doing otherwise.
Since patents are basically a temporary right granted to inventors by limiting the rights to use certain ideas for the whole society, why not charging a licence fee or tax for the duration of this privilege - very much like the state is charging telephone companies for the right to use limited frequency ressources.
The space of ideas (esp. in the field of software patents where usually every hacker thinking longer about a problem will come up with a simmilar solution) is clearly a public ressource to all mankind, so I don't see why patent holders shouldn't pay for their temporary monopoly to exploit parts of it, esp. as the common practice of look-away or defense-only patents doesn't serve the original intent of making new technology faster available.
What about the following scheme: everybody who files for a (justified) patent has to fix a buyout price for it (i.e. should a group of people or companies pay the patent holder this price, then the patent immediately becomes void and the technology is from then on free for everybody to use). The holder of the patent is then required to pay an annual percentual tax (something about 1 to 5 %, maybe also increasing with time) of this price for as long as he wishes to uphold the patent (up to it's maximum duration). The buyout price can be annually adopted within a certain range (say +/- 20%) by the holder to react to new technological developements.
A annual patent fee would make it expensive to hold on to patents which don't generate revenue (and therefor don't help promote technology), be it either because they are bogus to begin with (no one will pay amazon a dime for their one-click patent since it is probably not valid in the first place), or simply useless or obsolete.
This also has the additional benefit of keeping the number of patents low (which is always a good thing, as it means more freedom for everyone and less restrictions on innovation, or - in one word - less lawyers) while not cutting too much into the legetimate revenue of the holders.
It also makes the patent market more transparent and reduces the risk of abiguities or unintentional violations as patents holders have to be in bussines somehow (either by exploiting their patent themselves or by offering licences) as they usually won't be able to afford to simply wait and then cache in from unsuspecting "offenders" (as with the GIF-patent issue).
While I personally consider the concept of intellectual property as problematic per se, I realise that some incentive has to be given for making your brainwork publicly available. So the poposed scheme is some sort of compromise, which, while being compatible with the current patent system, might at least control some of the current abuse, by simply making hoarding patents for the sake of hoarding less profitable.
Fortunately, the Russian government has no plans to put this on the agenda. Why can't we all just build the ISS like good little countries??"
Because AFAIK the US has the final command authority over the station, which is ok, since they're also investing the most money, but makes it (a) difficult for the others to perform military research there and is (b) an image problem for a country which used to be ahead in the space race for a long time and is the only one with long-time experiance in operating a space station.
Taking the Russian space budget into account, this seems unlikely to occur any time soon. But it's nice to dream...
The Russian economy is currently doing much better then in the Yeltsin era (they even had a surplus on last years budget - something that many wealthy nations can still only dream of), so this is really just a matter of political will. Considering the current US missle defense plans, it's not too unlikely that this will change in the near future.
Soval, Tos? - Aren't male Vulkans of that era supposed to have 5-letter names beginning with "S" and ending in "k"? - OTOH, the only one conforming to that scheme is Silik, the evil alien. - An in-joke, a hint, a conspiracy...
1. Lurk in musical genre-themed chat room.
2. Look for users with good connection speeds/small ping/large number of shares
3. Browse through their shares.
4. Yuse tha fzzy logyc patrn-recognition systm God gave you.
... and we end up exactly where we used to be in the pre-napster era.
The whole point of napsters success and the reason why it began to trouble the big players in the music industry is that it is simple enough for the average windows user to (a) find and get the music he wants and (b) to offer his own collection for redistribution at the same time.
Making (a) or (b) even slightly more complicated and the whole scheme will collapse as it is unable to produce the necessary snowball-effect to attract a critical number of contributing users.
It is true that the Unix permission scheme is flat, but so is the current capabilities implementation described in the article. So this basically means that you need 1 group for each capability, which amounts to 30 extra groups for the currently implemented capabilities, which could be standardized across distributions.
As long as the overall permission scheme isn't also changed to something hierarchical (to cover fine grained device access), I think there is no point in providing a more complex capability system just for system calls. After all, you still would need to create an extra user to bundle device privileges (e.g. to allow xawtv access to all your TV and sound hardware, while restricting alevt to just the videotext device.).
Why not take the same approach to capabilities as it is done with devices: Standard UNIX permissions already allow any arbitrary combination of access rights to character and block-devices to be granted to users and (via. the SUID flag) also to programs.
To extend this scheme to privileged system calls, simply make up some pseudo file (e.g./proc/cap/settimeofday) and let the kernel check the permissions of these files against the uid of the calling process.
To implement capabilities, just make a new group for each pseudo-file (perm. 660), create a user for the privileged executable and make him a member of the necessary capability groups.
To stick with the xntpd example from the article:
-rwsr-x--- ntp admin/usr/bin/xntpd
-rw-rw---- root settime/proc/cap/settimeofday
-rw-rw---- root deamon/proc/cap/privport
while user "ntp" is member of the "settime" and "deamon". Any member of the "admin" group can then start xntpd, which then runs under SUID "ntp" and has only the necessary privileges to serve its supposed purpose.
Such an approach would have a number of advantages:
No recompiles of userland programms necessary.
Consitent with the existing permission scheme for device drivers.
Can be applied to users as well as programms.
Privileges can be revoked at any time without having to rely on proper behaviour of the program (e.g. gobally drop permissions to open privileged ports after boot-up phase)
No new userland tools necessary.
No extra process data structures in the kernel.
Dosn't require any new filesystem features.
Probably a lot easier to implement.
Just give all capability files perm 600 root.root and you have everything as it is now.
I'm sure that people more familiar with security systems will come up with an equally long list of drawbacks (lower flexibility in changing permissions dynamically or dropping privileges after startup comes to mind), I think, however, that the above scheme could solve a good deal of the existing problems without introducing too much new complexity.
IMO we should use a system that provides a trail that the voter can invoke to
prove his/her vote (but that cannot be traced backward to identify how a given
voter voted).
... and allowing people to be pressured to vote for certain candidates or sell their votes to the higest bidder?
One simple way to "prove" your vote e.g. is to receive a filled out ballot and to be ordered to return a blank ballot. This method has been used among the Yugoslav military to manipulate the elections in Serbia in favor of Milosevic.
Part of any free and secret voting system is denyability and any means to prove your vote is contradictory to that.
Slightly off. Encrypting/usr only gives an attacker more known ciphertext. A
good encrypting FS will encrypt the filenames, the directory structure, the whole
nine yards. They'd have a lot of known-ciphertext and a lot of cribs ("we can
predict there will be an/sbin directory off the/usr directory"), but that's not the
same as a known-plaintext.
Well, if you consider that most Linux systems are installed from standard distributions, the installation process is at least partly reproducable and current Linux FSs don't randomize block allocations, it is very likely that you can come up with know plaintext: just make a/usr partition of exatly the same size as the one founded on the stolen harddisk, do a default-install of the distribution and see to which blocks standard files (preferably those installed very early in the installation process)
are allocated.
MojoNations claims to be a strictly distributed peed to peer network, and form what I've understood, this is true for the technical resources as bandwidth, storage and CPU but not for the electronic currency involved, which is (correct me if I'm wrong here) managed by a central authority at mojonation.net which not only keeps all mojo accounts but is also able to "print" new mojo in arbitrary amounts.
This has some serious consequences which IMHO partially defy the purpose of mojonet as a fair, decentralized, anonymous and censorship proof way of file-sharing:
fairness: The value of the mojo currecy is not only determined be the market but also by the total ammount of mojo available, which is controlled by a single company. Should mojonation.net e.g. decide to double the amount of mojo tokens for some marketing campaign, this alone would halve the value of your mojo account.
centralisation: All efforts to decentralize technical ressources, while improving scalability, don't make the system itself any more robust than more centralized approaches (like e.g. napster) as the bookkeeping server still remains a single point of failure for the whole system. And for the case that mojonation.net goes out of bussiness, besides from not being able to use the service anymore, users would also suffer material losses as their accounts are nullified over night.
anonymity: Any user will regularily have to contact the central bookkeeping server. Monitoring the activity of this server allows to identify the IPs of all users and the amount of their activity.
censorship: A central server also means that there is someone to sue, for whatever reason, legimate or not. Considering the fact that mojonation.net is based in the US, it is only a matter of time until they are forced to implement restrictions or shut down their service. This is especially unfair to non-US users who are put at the mercy of a foreign legislation which has a notorious track record when it comes to intellectual property. (Remember that, unlike a "stateless" system like e.g. napster, with MojoNation, users are forced to pay (money or recources) in advance befor they have a chance to get anything back, so it is legitimate to expect some reliability.)
An obvoius solution for the above problem would be to not only decentralize the resources but also the mojo itself i.e. to allow multiple currencies: anybody who thinks that he is trustworthy enough to other users can issue his own mojo-brand and set up a standardized bookkeeping server.
Users can then decide which "currencies" they accept and besides the other 4 services they can run on their brokers, can also offer to change currencies for other users at rates they define for themselves.
This way, you can use market mechanisms to sort out untrustworty currencies and give the users the choice to decide for themselves where to put their virtual cash.
Other than MP3 or RA, GSM has been designed primarily for compressing speech (afaik it's optimized for a German speaking male voice, ymmv). I record radio programs via cron job on a daily basis, and at a sample frequency of 11025 Hz (8 MB/hour) - as opposed to the standard 8 kHz - there is practically no audible difference between the (mono) FM broadcast and the GSM replay. Moreover the compression doesn't use too much CPU so even some old 486 should do it in realtime.
If you looking for a lightweight command-line tool for GSM compression, check out the GSM Tools from my homepage (thx to Jutta Degener and Carsten Bormann for their GSM library).
Slashdot Mirror
Worthless as in "not cost effective to launch back to earth orbit", yes. After all, at least in the short to medium term, your potential customers will require any poducts to be delivered to GEO and below.
The main problem here is the lack of rocket fuel (i.e. volatiles) on the moon, which, besides being a very attractive product in its own right, ATM is the only way to get something out of the moon's gravity well, as more effective engine types (ion, plasma, solar thermal, etc.) are not suitable to provide the necessary thrust for launch (while they would be perfectly viable to transport stuff to and from astroids).
The availability of a lunar based mass driver and the existence of customers at the earth-moon lagrange points might eventually change the picture, but not any time soon. Until then, you have to bring along all your fuel from earth. Helium-3 is pretty much the only ressource which would be worth the hassle, IF ways can be found to mine it in significant quantities AND to use it as fusion fuel (again, not likely to happen any time soon).
> We will eventually need access to both resources,
agreed
> but it will probably be easier to first establish
> a presence on the moon than on one or more asteroids.
Not if the goal is to bootstrap an (enonomically) self-sustaining process. It might make sense as a "training camp" for mars, but while this is a viable scientific / political goal, it does not help to bring along a new space "gold rush".
Forgetting one moment about the ridiculous time schedule (17 years with current technology after Apollo took less than 10 years after starting virtually from scratch half a century ago is simply embarrassing), the question remains what to do up there besides scientific explorations. The Moon is basically a pile of worthless dirt: Light crust material with all the volatiles gassed out.
Going after astroids is both cheaper (in terms of delta-v) and more interesting economically: You have anything from volatile rich comets to core material iron/nickel balls in all different sizes and at delta-vs as low as several hundred m/s from HEO (as compared to 2 x 1.4 km/s for the moon). Also, a zero gravity enviroment has many advantages for processing, requires less structural support (e.g. for solar pannels and mirrors) and makes it easy to move heavy stuff around.
After all, if you're serious about developing a permanent space presence, you will need some sort of space industry which is easier to bootstrap from astroids than on the moon.
I think that, by default, all information should go to the public domain after a fairly short period of, say 5 years after publication. The duration has to be less than the typical half-life period of the media and data formats involved, otherwise stuff can too easily get lost before it gets legal to shift to and distribute in current data formats. After all, getting more stuff eventually into the public domain IS the stated purpose of copyright law.
If someone wishes to retain copyright privileges for a longer time, say up to 25 years after publication, which is half the current limit and more than enough to allow the author (in reality: the media companies) for reasonable compensation, then it should be required to submit the work in a specified digital format to a public database which is there to make sure that the work is readily available to the public after the copyright has expired.
The cost for such a database could be covered by a yearly fee from the copyright holders. After all, they get a prolonged state sanctioned monopoly over the work at the expense of everyone else. It's only fair for society to expect something in return. Also, the existence of such a database would greatly simplify the resolvment of legal issues in the enforcement of the granted monopoly.
A customizable BIOS with the Kernel in flash would be the proper place to setup user authentication, software harddisk encryption, firewall rules and VPNs. If supported by the kernel (AFAIK OpenBSD has such a feature; don't know about Linux), you could switch the OS into a secure mode after boot up and initialization where it is no longer possible to change certain settings before you even access the harddrive.
....." banner on startup and some epoxy over the bios flash rom ...
It's basically as close as you can get to "tamper-proof" by a software-only approach and for notebooks, it would provide some reasonable theft protection, esp. if combined with a "this notebook is the property of
It your "innovation" can be split into two parts, one part of which is a data medium an the other part is an information processing device which does not infringe on the claimed patent, then the combination of the two is not liable for patent protection.
An easier way would be to simply state that the content of a data carrier such as a dvd or a book can never consitute patent infringement, regardless of your claim.
Obviously, when a machine with no auditing features is used in an election, there's a very high chance that whoever ordered or built said machine did so with the purpose of being able to manipulating the result. But that's not the only and not even the worst problem.
While the manipulation problem can be fixed by generating a voter-verifyable paper trail (NOT an easy problem, but doable), this still leaves us with the harder problem of secrecy (or potential lack thereof).
A voter who enters his decision into an electronic black box can never be sure that his vote is not secretly recorded and used against him later. The problem here is not only that this actually happens, the rumour that it MIGHT happen is already enough to make a free election impossible.
This is *not* a Video card with an FPGA, this is an FPGA-card with Video-out capabilities; that is: a customary programmable FPGA board at the price of a mid-range Graphic card. The VGA-core (2D or 3D doesn't matter a bit) is really nothing more than a demo application and probably the first thing which gets replaced when this baby is put to the use it is meant for: video- and signal processing, I/O+control applications and custom hardware acceleration (crypto, compression, ECC/FEC, you name it ...).
See that I can plug in a camera and those video pattern-recognition tasks which now require custom built DSP- or FPGA-boards can suddenly be run on commodity hardware. Attach a micropohone, and we're talking about next generation PC speech recognition. Add some spare I/O-pins and get 1us response times for your hard-realtime applications by "hard-wiring" critical IRQ-handlers on the FPGA.
The potential for bringing FPGAs to the PC mass market is HUGE and even more so in the context of OpenSource. Once supported by the OS, resource demanding programs might ship with their own FPGA acceleration modules. This product might have the potential of becoming the standard for this new technology.
The idea of patents is to compensate innovators by temproarily restricting the freedom of all members of the jurististiction to which it applies, to take advantage of a fact (the invention), such that the original finder of that fact can make money, either by exploiting the fact itself or by charging others for the right to do so.
(Useful) facts are very much like real estate: You can only exercise you property right by limiting the rights of others. In any free society, you need a good reason for restricting the rights of the public; in the case of patents, this is done to compensate the inventor (the original finder of the fact) and thereby spur innovation. If patents aren't used to that end (and in the case of software patents, they rarely are), then they are damaging to society.
So what we need is a scheme, that encourages patents only if they are actually used to make money by making the benefits of the invention available to the public. This simplest way to do this is a price-dependent tax on patents.
Whoever wants to file a patent has to put a price tag to it, for which is is willing to sell out his patent to the public domain. He is completly free by selecting this price. However, to uphold his patent, he has to pay an annual fee of, say 1%, of this buy-out price. The price can be adapeted yearly but only in a range of, say, +/- 25%. If, during the runtime of the patent, anyone pays the patent holder the buy-out price, then the patent enters the public domain immediately.
If the patent is any good and actually used to produce goods or give away licences, 1% is a rather small amount. If its only used as a lockaway patent, to hinder innovation, protect an obsolete business model or as a weapon in court, then it is expensive, as it doesn't generate any direct revenue.
I understand that firefox has popups suppressed by default which is a good thing. Why on earth, there is no simple way to suppress the (firefox-made) popups trying to ask me if I want to download fancy XY-plungin for the 100th time? If you have to, add an extra "No, but please keep asking me over and over" button, but by default, one "No" per plugin type should be enough not to ever be bothered with shockwave et al. again.
> I was thinking more along the lines of bringing it in the traditional way that the space shuttle does, i.e. in liquid form in tanks.
If you have to bring along the oxygen anyway, then this wouldn't be too helpful: 1 kg of oxygen can burn no more than 300g of kerosin, so more than 3/4 of the fuel would have to be LOX, anyway.
Also, the hydrogen would have to be compressed, befor it can be burned by conventional rocket engines. Also, a rocket is only effective if it accellerates at several g's, as the portion of thrust used to merely balance earth's gravity doesn't add to the kinetic energy of the vehicle and is basically lost; the drag of the balloon's hull would make this an impossibilty.
So you would have to deflate the balloon and compress the hydrogen into a compact tank befor you can fire the engines, all of this in a matter of seconds, as you are getting into free fall once you start the deflation.
Thanks for mentioning QCL! After all, QCL has already been around for 3 years as the first version of the above article appeared in March 2001 and the QC-lib (libqc), a C++ library comparable to the QRAM lib, which now serves as the simulation back-end of the QCL interpreter dates back to 1996.
cu
Bernhard Oemer
Of corse, you already knew that (0.04c would be too good to be true).
Another way to play around with nonclassical algorithms and get your feet wet with quantum programming would be QCL.
QCL is a procedural quantum programming language which provides nonclassical language elements such as unitary operators, running code in reverse, scratch space management, etc. A Linux interpreter (GPL) which simulates a quantum computer with an arbitrary number of qubits is available here.
Problem is, hunting them down and bringing them to trial/applying the framework of international law/etc etc etc is nothing more than laughable weakness to these people
That's beside the point: It is of no importance what it means to them. Not playing by your own rules demonstrates that you think that these very rules (the law, international treaties, etc.) are laughable. The willingness to throw those principles overboard while claiming to defend them is the real sign of weakness. By doing that, you are acually conceding defeat. Of course, the same principle also applies to all restrictions of freedom you are willing to accept for the illusion of security.
However, in the meantime this particular enemy has demonstrated just how far it is willing to go. Would they use nuclear weapons or biologicals? Can you imagine for a second that they wouldn't?
They will, and basically there's not much you can do to prevent this, except finding those very people befor they act. But I doubt that 4 carrier groups and >700 planes will be of any good to acheive that goal. On the contrary: the resulting collateral damage - not in terms of innocent victims, but in terms of induced hate and additional people willing to commit there lives to terrorism - will make things worse even if you choose to ignore any ethical concerns.
There's a time for the legal framework and a time to go out and kill certain people who represent a direct threat to public safety.
The problem is finding those people. Once you know who and where they are, it costs you nothing to at last try to arrest them (and shoot them if they don't comply) and thus play by the rules. And if you don't know who and where they are, then any military effort is useless, anyway.
I think that the political situation in Pakistan is an even greater danger - not only to the success of the retaliation mission - but to the stability in the whole region.
Remember that the Pakistan government had to be "convinced" by an US ultimatum to join the anti-Taliban coalition and have no reason to particularily like the US because of the (now lifted) sanctions. If inner state opposition - let alone a civil war - causes a change in Pakistan policy, then the US troops who might use the land as a staging area for the upcoming operation - will be in real trouble.
I'm from Europe, and even here - acoording to the latest gallup poll - 80% of the population is against a miltary US punitive expedition (and yes, it is viewed as a punitive expedition as the US didn't even bother to negotiate, get a full UN mandate, or at least show some proof of Bin Laden's guilt, as they would have to do in any proper extradition process) - extrapolate that to a muslimic country and you might get an inpression on how thin the ice really is.
As for my personal opinion: I think that the whole rethoric of war is misguided: Terror is basically organised crime (with the objective of killing people rather than making money) - or does the US really think that the suicide pilots qualify as soldiers? I guess that would do them too much honor.
This should really be a matter of the courts, the police, the CIA and - if necessary - a military police operation to get hold of the suspects after all proof is on the table. This is how crime is handled in a constitutional state and I think the US owes it to itself to play by its own rules here, esp. because - as the only remaining superpower - it can get anway doing otherwise.
Since patents are basically a temporary right granted to inventors by limiting the rights to use certain ideas for the whole society, why not charging a licence fee or tax for the duration of this privilege - very much like the state is charging telephone companies for the right to use limited frequency ressources.
The space of ideas (esp. in the field of software patents where usually every hacker thinking longer about a problem will come up with a simmilar solution) is clearly a public ressource to all mankind, so I don't see why patent holders shouldn't pay for their temporary monopoly to exploit parts of it, esp. as the common practice of look-away or defense-only patents doesn't serve the original intent of making new technology faster available.
What about the following scheme: everybody who files for a (justified) patent has to fix a buyout price for it (i.e. should a group of people or companies pay the patent holder this price, then the patent immediately becomes void and the technology is from then on free for everybody to use). The holder of the patent is then required to pay an annual percentual tax (something about 1 to 5 %, maybe also increasing with time) of this price for as long as he wishes to uphold the patent (up to it's maximum duration). The buyout price can be annually adopted within a certain range (say +/- 20%) by the holder to react to new technological developements.
A annual patent fee would make it expensive to hold on to patents which don't generate revenue (and therefor don't help promote technology), be it either because they are bogus to begin with (no one will pay amazon a dime for their one-click patent since it is probably not valid in the first place), or simply useless or obsolete.
This also has the additional benefit of keeping the number of patents low (which is always a good thing, as it means more freedom for everyone and less restrictions on innovation, or - in one word - less lawyers) while not cutting too much into the legetimate revenue of the holders.
It also makes the patent market more transparent and reduces the risk of abiguities or unintentional violations as patents holders have to be in bussines somehow (either by exploiting their patent themselves or by offering licences) as they usually won't be able to afford to simply wait and then cache in from unsuspecting "offenders" (as with the GIF-patent issue).
While I personally consider the concept of intellectual property as problematic per se, I realise that some incentive has to be given for making your brainwork publicly available. So the poposed scheme is some sort of compromise, which, while being compatible with the current patent system, might at least control some of the current abuse, by simply making hoarding patents for the sake of hoarding less profitable.
Fortunately, the Russian government has no plans to put this on the agenda. Why can't we all just build the ISS like good little countries??"
Because AFAIK the US has the final command authority over the station, which is ok, since they're also investing the most money, but makes it (a) difficult for the others to perform military research there and is (b) an image problem for a country which used to be ahead in the space race for a long time and is the only one with long-time experiance in operating a space station.
Taking the Russian space budget into account, this seems unlikely to occur any time soon. But it's nice to dream...
The Russian economy is currently doing much better then in the Yeltsin era (they even had a surplus on last years budget - something that many wealthy nations can still only dream of), so this is really just a matter of political will. Considering the current US missle defense plans, it's not too unlikely that this will change in the near future.
Soval, Tos? - Aren't male Vulkans of that era supposed to have 5-letter names beginning with "S" and ending in "k"? - OTOH, the only one conforming to that scheme is Silik, the evil alien. - An in-joke, a hint, a conspiracy ...
1. Lurk in musical genre-themed chat room.
2. Look for users with good connection speeds/small ping/large number of shares
3. Browse through their shares.
4. Yuse tha fzzy logyc patrn-recognition systm God gave you.
... and we end up exactly where we used to be in the pre-napster era.
The whole point of napsters success and the reason why it began to trouble the big players in the music industry is that it is simple enough for the average windows user to (a) find and get the music he wants and (b) to offer his own collection for redistribution at the same time.
Making (a) or (b) even slightly more complicated and the whole scheme will collapse as it is unable to produce the necessary snowball-effect to attract a critical number of contributing users.
It is true that the Unix permission scheme is flat, but so is the current capabilities implementation described in the article. So this basically means that you need 1 group for each capability, which amounts to 30 extra groups for the currently implemented capabilities, which could be standardized across distributions.
As long as the overall permission scheme isn't also changed to something hierarchical (to cover fine grained device access), I think there is no point in providing a more complex capability system just for system calls. After all, you still would need to create an extra user to bundle device privileges (e.g. to allow xawtv access to all your TV and sound hardware, while restricting alevt to just the videotext device.).
To extend this scheme to privileged system calls, simply make up some pseudo file (e.g.
To implement capabilities, just make a new group for each pseudo-file (perm. 660), create a user for the privileged executable and make him a member of the necessary capability groups.
To stick with the xntpd example from the article:
-rwsr-x--- ntp admin
-rw-rw---- root settime
-rw-rw---- root deamon
while user "ntp" is member of the "settime" and "deamon". Any member of the "admin" group can then start xntpd, which then runs under SUID "ntp" and has only the necessary privileges to serve its supposed purpose.
Such an approach would have a number of advantages:
I'm sure that people more familiar with security systems will come up with an equally long list of drawbacks (lower flexibility in changing permissions dynamically or dropping privileges after startup comes to mind), I think, however, that the above scheme could solve a good deal of the existing problems without introducing too much new complexity.
One simple way to "prove" your vote e.g. is to receive a filled out ballot and to be ordered to return a blank ballot. This method has been used among the Yugoslav military to manipulate the elections in Serbia in favor of Milosevic.
Part of any free and secret voting system is denyability and any means to prove your vote is contradictory to that.
Well, if you consider that most Linux systems are installed from standard distributions, the installation process is at least partly reproducable and current Linux FSs don't randomize block allocations, it is very likely that you can come up with know plaintext: just make a /usr partition of exatly the same size as the one founded on the stolen harddisk, do a default-install of the distribution and see to which blocks standard files (preferably those installed very early in the installation process)
are allocated.
This has some serious consequences which IMHO partially defy the purpose of mojonet as a fair, decentralized, anonymous and censorship proof way of file-sharing:
- fairness: The value of the mojo currecy is not only determined be the market but also by the total ammount of mojo available, which is controlled by a single company. Should mojonation.net e.g. decide to double the amount of mojo tokens for some marketing campaign, this alone would halve the value of your mojo account.
- centralisation: All efforts to decentralize technical ressources, while improving scalability, don't make the system itself any more robust than more centralized approaches (like e.g. napster) as the bookkeeping server still remains a single point of failure for the whole system. And for the case that mojonation.net goes out of bussiness, besides from not being able to use the service anymore, users would also suffer material losses as their accounts are nullified over night.
- anonymity: Any user will regularily have to contact the central bookkeeping server. Monitoring the activity of this server allows to identify the IPs of all users and the amount of their activity.
- censorship: A central server also means that there is someone to sue, for whatever reason, legimate or not. Considering the fact that mojonation.net is based in the US, it is only a matter of time until they are forced to implement restrictions or shut down their service. This is especially unfair to non-US users who are put at the mercy of a foreign legislation which has a notorious track record when it comes to intellectual property. (Remember that, unlike a "stateless" system like e.g. napster, with MojoNation, users are forced to pay (money or recources) in advance befor they have a chance to get anything back, so it is legitimate to expect some reliability.)
An obvoius solution for the above problem would be to not only decentralize the resources but also the mojo itself i.e. to allow multiple currencies: anybody who thinks that he is trustworthy enough to other users can issue his own mojo-brand and set up a standardized bookkeeping server.Users can then decide which "currencies" they accept and besides the other 4 services they can run on their brokers, can also offer to change currencies for other users at rates they define for themselves. This way, you can use market mechanisms to sort out untrustworty currencies and give the users the choice to decide for themselves where to put their virtual cash.
Other than MP3 or RA, GSM has been designed primarily for compressing speech (afaik it's optimized for a German speaking male voice, ymmv). I record radio programs via cron job on a daily basis, and at a sample frequency of 11025 Hz (8 MB/hour) - as opposed to the standard 8 kHz - there is practically no audible difference between the (mono) FM broadcast and the GSM replay. Moreover the compression doesn't use too much CPU so even some old 486 should do it in realtime.
If you looking for a lightweight command-line tool for GSM compression, check out the GSM Tools from my homepage (thx to Jutta Degener and Carsten Bormann for their GSM library).