Although the panspermia theory is intriguing, it does NOT answer the question of the origin of life -- was it from another planet that was inoculated by an even earlier comet..... It's like the theory that the Earth rides on the back of a giant turtle/ But what does that turtle ride on? Or is it turtles all the way down.
If we are to assess the probability that life is exogenous or endogenous to Earth, we must ask about the relative probability of: a) life forming on a planetary body versus b) life forming on a planetary body which then survives being blasted into space, travelling interstellar distances, happening to collide with another forming planet of just the right composition (without ever venturing too close to some hot star), and surviving that collision.
Even if the probability of life arising on a planet very very low, the relative probability of endogenous versus exogenous origin is very skewed toward endogenous origin. Because exogenous origin requires both endogenous origin (somewhere else) and then a low probability trip between planets, exogenous origin would seem to be very unlikely unless there are large numbers of planets with endogenous life that spew lots of interstellar-traversing chunks. But if there are large numbers of planets with with their own endogenous life, then the probability of life forming on Earth endogenously must also be high and trump the low likelihood of life just happening to make it from somewhere else.
That a great way to be a good neighbor. Piss all over all the channels available so no one else can do anything.
I was about to post with the same sentiment until I read more on the tech.
MIMO is not your typical blast-it-on-multiple channels approach. This article discusses the technology. Instead of using up a bunch of channels, MIMO systems send multiple signals on one channel and use multiple antennas and advanced algorithms on both ends to sort out which signal came from or went which direction.
Intel's recurring costs are irrelevant to its business model. The bulk of the cost is in R&D and the fabrication plants. R&D at Intel is about $5 billion per year and the company has almost $16 billion in plant and equipment. Worse, Intel's fabs aren't really a long-term assets in the traditional sense. Unlike most manufacturing companies, Intel's plant and equipment goes obsolete on a time scale not that different from the chips. An old 130 nm fab or one using the old 8" wafers is increasingly obsolete. Even today, Intel is looking to replace its 90 nm fabs wiht 65 nm fabs in 2006 and 45 nm fabs in 2007. And at $1 to $3 billion for each new new fab, the money comes from chips.
The only way to pay for all this expensive equipment and R&D that is obsolete with a few years is to maximize revenue on every fab line. In that regard, Intel is in the same boat as the pharmaceutical and airline companies -- low recurring costs but huge upfront investments.
I'm not saying that Intel isn't hugely profitable only that the "cost" of a chip is much much higher than $40.
The core problem, in the age of the internet, is that anyone can say anything about anybody and be potentially accessible on a world stage. Thus, what some patient posts about a doctor can have a significant impact on that doctor. If I Google a doctor's name and some thisdoctorsucks.com entry pops up, I'm not going to visit that doctor.
As it stands, doctors have no recourse (except for lawsuits) to put in their side of the story. I'd bet that many cases of malpractice are actually cases of "malpatients" -- the patient's own stupidity, irresponsibility, lack of candor, or failure to follow the doctor's recommendations contributed to or even caused the problem. Add to that the simple problem of mismatch of social styles and one person's "uncaring" physician is another person's efficient doctor.
My point is that any system that potentially inflicts damage on a person's reputation should have a "due process" mechanism that lets that accused defend their actions or tell their side of the story. To avoid costs, this system needs to be automated so that if the patient can post their allegations online, the doctor can reply with their side of the story.
1. Collect data from unsuspecting users of your SOAP code.
2. Throw an "exception" containing said data.
3. Automatically harvest the data from ExceptionCollection.com.
4. Profit.
I wonder if these people have thought about the insecure/immoral/illegal ways this service could be used and have taken steps to prevent that.
Are there really people here that value their time at a couple pennies per minute?
Sadly, the answer is yes. I've a friend who is very intelligent, well paid, and otherwise normal. But every year he spends hours filling out the "petroleum depletion allowance" form for the IRS because its gets him back about $1 (his house has some microscopic percentage of some mineral rights). And I know another business associate who drove across town rather than pay postage to mail something.
I have no hard data (except for a 2001 article suggesting that 1 in 37 online transactions has a charge-back and 1 in 100 are fraudulent), but I'd bet that a sizable fraction of the population would dispute ANY anomalous charge no matter how small. Such people would view the spurious charge as theft and dispute it. "It's the principle of the thing" that motivates these people. Sure, some people, such as yourself, do the personal math and decide its not worth it. But others, many others, are driven by principle, not rationality.
The core challenge for small micropayments is the high cost of dealing with disputes. The cost to the company of a single dispute can be $5 to $50 depending on how much communication and labor is required to resolve a disputed transaction. If the transaction service is only charging a penny, then it only takes disputed charges in 1 in 5000 to 1 in 500 transactions to totally consume all the revenues - leaving no money for the actual service (software, hardware, marketing, etc.) in the other 99.9% of the transactions. Even if the cost of the technology were zero, these "real people" costs would make micropayments prohibitive.
Paypal tries to avoid these high cost by making it very hard to contact a "real" person. Real people just cost too much. Of course, Paypal's alleged reputation for poor customer service (see paypalsucks.com) is the side effect of trying to keep costs down to enable low-dollar transactions.
Perhaps when someone creates a competent AI for customer service, micropayments could work. Given that most companies still have trouble getting competent people for customer service, I'm not hopeful.
Excel is frozen in time. When people no longer need compatibility with MS Office/OpenOffice, then Excel will die its much-deserved death.
Back in the 1980s I used a wonderful "presentation worksheet" program called Trapeze on the Macintosh. It used named variables instead of row-column references and was insanely powerful. You could position your data variables anywhere you wanted, style and size them independently of other datablocks. The datablocks could even automatically resize if the numbers of rows and columns in the variable changed.
It died in the marketplace because reveiws claimed it wasn't "Excel-like."
I'm not sure whether gas is too expensive or too cheap because nobody has done a full accounting of both the non-market costs and benefits of low gas prices. Yes, gas does have significant hidden costs in terms of green house gases, air pollution, and geopolitical/military issues. Proponents of gas taxes always mention these downsides as a rationale for higher gas taxes. But I would argue that cheap gas also has a number of significant hidden benefits.
Cheap gas enables speed and distance for both goods and people. This has many beneficial effects, including:
Consumers can afford a wider variety of goods at a lower levels of cost. This means that a person in NY in winter can get Florida orange juice for a modest price.
Consumers can afford to drive a little farther to find the best goods at the best prices. Rather than be forced to buy from an expensive, small store nearby (as much as I like Mon'n'Pop stores, they are more expensive and offer worse selection), consumers can shop around and buy the best items at the lowest cost.
Workers can find a better job by traveling a longer distance at higher effective speed -- a fixed commute time, but greater commute distance. Mass transit, in most regions of the country, is much slower than a personal automobile. Our area has a decent mass-transit system, but the effective speed is half that of an automobile due to frequent stops, schedule intervals, and the walk to/from the bus stop. Speed has a quadratic effect: a 2X increase the average speed means 4X the number of possible employers within given maximum commuting time.
Workers probably can probably get higher pay by finding an employer in their expanded commuting range. With more employers to chose from, a job seeker can probably find an employer who will pay a little more to get that employee's unique combination of skills and experience.
Employers get better workers. Imagine a company that can only hire people living within a mile of the company versus a company that can tap into a much larger pool of applicants. When employees are mobile, companies get better workers. This translates into more success for the company, shareholders, workers, and greater tax revenues for government projects.
Companies can tap into suppliers that are further from them. It means that a manufacturer in Arizona can find and buy the best components, even if they are made 2000 miles way in Georgia.
Likewise, each company can sell goods to a greater part of the U.S. giving them better economies of scale.
The result is both higher standards of living and better economic growth than we would see if we had high gas prices. I'm not saying that gas taxes explain all of the disparity between the U.S. and Europe in terms of economic growth and unemployment rates, but I'd bet its a factor. My point is that low gas prices have under-appreciated, hidden benefits that are good for consumers, good for workers, good for employers, good for companies, and good for the country.
I have no idea if these hidden benefits override the hidden costs, but I feel that both sides of the indirect effects must be tallied before declaring that gas/oil should be taxed to inhibit consumption.
There are some species of fungus that attack insects and change the behavior of the victim. The last dying act of the host is to climb to the top of the nearest grass/plant stem bite down on the stem with a death grip and die there. The fungus then sprouts from the body (it looks attractive in a creepy sort of way) . The perch provides a good place for the fungus to disperse its spores.
Within every DRM system there will always be a way for the author to set the copy rights to allow freely made copies. There are always people who want their stuff copied or who don't care or who don't want the recipient encumbered by any restrictions.
That said, PHBs and paternalist OSes from Redmond may decide the implement restrictive DRM settings for their own idiotic reasons. I noticed more than one company annual report that uses a password protected PDF to prevent copy-past operations for who knows what reason. Yet the first time a small content creator's use of DRM causes problems for their big client, the small company will "turn off" DRM.
As long as there are people that want to be heard as far and wide as possible, there will be a public domain.
Except... the whole point of free/open software is that it's/not/ controlled by one overriding personality.
The fluffy ideal that so many try their very best to uphold is that if you mix enough intellect, enthusiasm and good nature together for long enough, something beautiful will result.
Agreed on both counts. But if Linux becomes a popular OS, then it will attract some less fluffy personalities who only see it as a quick way to make a buck. If this idealistic group has no mechanism for ejecting/controlling wayward, sleazy elements, then the group's reputation will quickly sink to that of its worst members.
Moreover, if Linux supporters feel that their efforts are only going toward lining the pockets of a few "Linux" companies, then they will withdraw their support, labors, and love. Controlling the marque is a way to control the integrity of the brand and of the movement.
Suggesting that the mix then requires a high degree of control significantly detracts from this ideal.
Not a high degree of control, but some control, yes.
Either Linux Mark Institute believes in the ideal, in which case truth, justice and the American way will bring about a rosy future for Linux, or it doesn't, in which case it needs to close the source. There is no third way.
Perhaps your post was simply sarcasm. If so, I apologize for taking it seriously. I only think that if Linux wants to be taken seriously, then Linux/Linus/LMI/whoever needs to take the Linux name seriously.
I suspect that some of this is about reputation. If Linux is to become a widely-used, trusted OS, then it needs trustworthy businesses to provide trustworthy services. The first step is to control the name "Linux" so that only those companies that adhere to certain standards, codes of conduct, etc. can be allowed to use the marque. Linus can't control the codebase, but he can control the name.
I'm not saying that the Linux Mark Institute is doing this, but it is what they should do as part of the Linux maturation process.
Antireflection coatings have a thickness of 1/4 lambda so that half the light that would normally be reflected is reflected with 180degrees phase shift. Thus for a single wavelength (v-Coating) it is possible to reduce reflection from 4% to less than 0.1%. For a broader range of wavelengths (U-coating) a number of coatings of different thicknesses are used.
Yes, a 1/4 lambda film maximizes antireflection but a thicker film also works -- reducing reflection from 4% to 2%.
The coating itself (typically CaF) is chosen because it is relatively easy to vapour-deposit to controlled thickness and because its refractive index is halfway between that of air and glass.
Actually CaF2 doesn't have a very good index (1.44). MgF2 is a bit better at 1.38. Neither are half-way for normal glass, but they do work well with higher index glasses.
Somehow I don't believe that the same effect could be achieved by a thin film of water, though it's probably better than nothing.
Water's index of 1.33 makes it better than MgF2 or CaF2 as an anti-reflective coating. I'm not sure how the anti-fog coating changes the index, though.
Their claim is valid. Anytime light passes through an abrupt change in the index of refraction (e.g., from air to glass), a percentage of the light it reflected back. That's why you see a ghost image of yourself in even "transparent" pieces of glass. On ordinary glass, about 4% of the light is reflected (removed) by each air-to-glass or glass-to-air interface (8% for each pane).
Adding a anti-reflective coating that has an intermediate index of refraction can reduce this. Nonlinearities in the reflection process mean that two interfaces of lesser change reflect far less than one big change. Camera lens makers do this all the time because many lens have 6 to 20 pieces of glass and thus a dozen or more interfaces that each would to attenuate light and create multiple internal reflections between the lens elements.
It may not be much, but that antifog coating probably lets a couple extra percent of the light through.
IANAL, but if a gun maker named their pistol "Felon's Favorite"(TM) or "Rob-Rite"(TM), then I'm sure they would be susceptible to either civil or criminal legal pleasantries.
Are there legitimate uses of this code? If so, then why didn't the author market it strictly for those uses and name it something a little less felonious than "Lover Spy?"
Given all the concern with rootkits, backdoors, worms, spyware, et al, it would seem that a nonflash-ROM bootloader could provide a secure micro-OS that in turn checks and helps maintain the integrity of the main OS. A boot-time diagnostic and some key read-only API code segments (encompassing access to crucial functions such as encryption, hash calculation, memory access, disk access, UI access, network access, etc.) would help ensure that the main OS was not compromised and was less susceptible to malware.
A small OS, even one with a GUI, can fit in less than a MB. Perhaps a heavily secured, stripped-down copy of some stable version of *nix could provide a high-integrity read-only core underlying a more sophisticated, extensible, and flexible full-featured OS.
I'd want to see how the material handles long-term exposure to vacuum and large temperature swings before using it in any space-borne structural applications. Most plastics contain plasticizers that help improve flexibility and handling properties, but which slowly evaporate leaving the material brittle (anyone ever see what happens to a plastic milk jug left in the sun for a year?). Moreover, plastics tend to have structural properties that are very temperature sensitive -- at modestly high temperatures, plastics slowly stretch to failure, at modestly low temperatures, they fracture. The "temperature" in space is strongly dependent on whether the surface is facing the sun or not. It's baking hot on the sunny side and freezing cold on the shady side -- not a good environment for plastics.
Being disconnected from 911 because you refused to acknowledge a letter saying that you run the risk of being disconnected from 911 if you rely on VOIP.
Only a world-class bureaucracy could come up with this idea.
I hope that web designers don't assume that the sound is on and try to transmit important information via voice because on my computer it is not.
Does HTTP, etc. offer anyway for a web page to check if sound is even on? If not, then sound is only useful for useless background audio.
Personally, I think voice is a horrible one-to-many communication medium because it is intrusive and linear -- its not browsable. It's like all those horrible Flash animations that slow down the user to a 1st grade reading level while you wait for the words to swirl/materialize into place.
Please keep the web self-paced (not designer-paced).
The real promise of androids won't be realized until people get implants in the first few months of life. That is when the brain is the most plastic -- a blank slate that could learn how to interpret signals from a laser-ranging scanner or to innately operate some novel effector in the world (e.g., brain-stem connected keyboard). Such early-age androids would be able to use their augmentations as seamlessly as most people see or walk -- they just won't have to think about it. I'm not saying that older people can't learn (although in the cases of some phonemes, it is a problem), only that the full opportunity for the higher performance will come when androids have from-birth experience with artificial augmentation.
The ethical issues are horrible but not insurmountable -- current societies would lock away any parent that tried to implant experimental hardware into their baby. But I wonder if research on prosthetic devices -- implanted in babies who are accident/cancer victims -- will reveal how powerfully a young mind can make use of artificially attached hardware. With valid data on the value of the device, people (and society) may be less frightened of early-age augmentation.
Captchas = Turing test
on
Defeating Captcha
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· Score: 4, Insightful
As with the Turing test, the entire purpose of a captcha is to distinguish humans from machines. As captcha-defeaters improve, the captchas will need to become more and more sophisticated and require more and more human or human-like intelligence to process. This arms race will culminate in a Turing test-like approach for discerning natural intelligences from artificial ones.
The ultimate irony may occur when the first human-intelligent computer is created by a spammer for the purpose of assaulting our collective intelligences with their commerical drivel. Given the increasing value of online commerce and Google page ranking, there's probably more money in AI for captchas than AI for academic research.
But before captchas get that sophisticated, the system will become self-defeating as the number of real humans defeated by captchas exceeds the number of AIs repelled by them.
If Google is draining talent, forcing pay raises and making it hard for start-ups, then it only means that the system is working. Money (and people) go where they are appreciated in a free, capitalist economy. If the start-ups have a better (more valuable) idea than Google's then they should be able to convince both prospective employees and VCs that they start-up is worth it.
Although economies aren't zero-sum games (many activities do grow the pie, or raise the tide that floats all boats), some aspects do have a win-lose component to them. Successful companies can afford (and should afford) to pay their workers more than unsuccessful ones. This means that successful companies will inevitably harm less successful companies by "draining" the labor pool and seem "evil."
If Google is evil it is because change is evil (to some) and because competition (for money, workers, customers, etc.) can be evil -- at least in the eyes of the less successful.
Disclaimer: I'm not a Google shareholder (their stock seems very overpriced relative to the long-term risks of Google's business model and the high expected earning built into the current stock price), but they do seem to be very successful.
On a FreeBSD system, you can set the "immutable flag" on a file. Given a high enough system securelevel, that file will be completely resistant to change (including unsetting that flag). This is extremely handy for locking down file signature databases, kernel files, and other likely targets for stealth modification. So long as that portion of the kernel stands intact, the system can never be completely clandestinely owned
Very interesting. This FAQ suggest that OS X retains BSD's immutable flag. In theory, the only way to change this flag in OS X is to reboot in single-user mode. I wonder if a rootkit could force a reboot into single user mode, change these flags, and reboot back to remotely own an OS X machine? I would assume that unless the rootkit can insert something into the single-user mode start-up sequence, the system immutable flag should be fairly safe. The big downside would be that System Update would cease to work (and probably create a corrupt partial update) if the wrong file were locked in this way (security vs. ease-of-use again!).
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Although the panspermia theory is intriguing, it does NOT answer the question of the origin of life -- was it from another planet that was inoculated by an even earlier comet..... It's like the theory that the Earth rides on the back of a giant turtle/ But what does that turtle ride on? Or is it turtles all the way down.
If we are to assess the probability that life is exogenous or endogenous to Earth, we must ask about the relative probability of: a) life forming on a planetary body versus b) life forming on a planetary body which then survives being blasted into space, travelling interstellar distances, happening to collide with another forming planet of just the right composition (without ever venturing too close to some hot star), and surviving that collision.
Even if the probability of life arising on a planet very very low, the relative probability of endogenous versus exogenous origin is very skewed toward endogenous origin. Because exogenous origin requires both endogenous origin (somewhere else) and then a low probability trip between planets, exogenous origin would seem to be very unlikely unless there are large numbers of planets with endogenous life that spew lots of interstellar-traversing chunks. But if there are large numbers of planets with with their own endogenous life, then the probability of life forming on Earth endogenously must also be high and trump the low likelihood of life just happening to make it from somewhere else.
That a great way to be a good neighbor. Piss all over all the channels available so no one else can do anything.
I was about to post with the same sentiment until I read more on the tech.
MIMO is not your typical blast-it-on-multiple channels approach. This article discusses the technology. Instead of using up a bunch of channels, MIMO systems send multiple signals on one channel and use multiple antennas and advanced algorithms on both ends to sort out which signal came from or went which direction.
Intel's recurring costs are irrelevant to its business model. The bulk of the cost is in R&D and the fabrication plants. R&D at Intel is about $5 billion per year and the company has almost $16 billion in plant and equipment. Worse, Intel's fabs aren't really a long-term assets in the traditional sense. Unlike most manufacturing companies, Intel's plant and equipment goes obsolete on a time scale not that different from the chips. An old 130 nm fab or one using the old 8" wafers is increasingly obsolete. Even today, Intel is looking to replace its 90 nm fabs wiht 65 nm fabs in 2006 and 45 nm fabs in 2007. And at $1 to $3 billion for each new new fab, the money comes from chips.
The only way to pay for all this expensive equipment and R&D that is obsolete with a few years is to maximize revenue on every fab line. In that regard, Intel is in the same boat as the pharmaceutical and airline companies -- low recurring costs but huge upfront investments.
I'm not saying that Intel isn't hugely profitable only that the "cost" of a chip is much much higher than $40.
The core problem, in the age of the internet, is that anyone can say anything about anybody and be potentially accessible on a world stage. Thus, what some patient posts about a doctor can have a significant impact on that doctor. If I Google a doctor's name and some thisdoctorsucks.com entry pops up, I'm not going to visit that doctor.
As it stands, doctors have no recourse (except for lawsuits) to put in their side of the story. I'd bet that many cases of malpractice are actually cases of "malpatients" -- the patient's own stupidity, irresponsibility, lack of candor, or failure to follow the doctor's recommendations contributed to or even caused the problem. Add to that the simple problem of mismatch of social styles and one person's "uncaring" physician is another person's efficient doctor.
My point is that any system that potentially inflicts damage on a person's reputation should have a "due process" mechanism that lets that accused defend their actions or tell their side of the story. To avoid costs, this system needs to be automated so that if the patient can post their allegations online, the doctor can reply with their side of the story.
1. Collect data from unsuspecting users of your SOAP code.
2. Throw an "exception" containing said data.
3. Automatically harvest the data from ExceptionCollection.com.
4. Profit.
I wonder if these people have thought about the insecure/immoral/illegal ways this service could be used and have taken steps to prevent that.
Are there really people here that value their time at a couple pennies per minute?
Sadly, the answer is yes. I've a friend who is very intelligent, well paid, and otherwise normal. But every year he spends hours filling out the "petroleum depletion allowance" form for the IRS because its gets him back about $1 (his house has some microscopic percentage of some mineral rights). And I know another business associate who drove across town rather than pay postage to mail something.
I have no hard data (except for a 2001 article suggesting that 1 in 37 online transactions has a charge-back and 1 in 100 are fraudulent), but I'd bet that a sizable fraction of the population would dispute ANY anomalous charge no matter how small. Such people would view the spurious charge as theft and dispute it. "It's the principle of the thing" that motivates these people. Sure, some people, such as yourself, do the personal math and decide its not worth it. But others, many others, are driven by principle, not rationality.
The core challenge for small micropayments is the high cost of dealing with disputes. The cost to the company of a single dispute can be $5 to $50 depending on how much communication and labor is required to resolve a disputed transaction. If the transaction service is only charging a penny, then it only takes disputed charges in 1 in 5000 to 1 in 500 transactions to totally consume all the revenues - leaving no money for the actual service (software, hardware, marketing, etc.) in the other 99.9% of the transactions. Even if the cost of the technology were zero, these "real people" costs would make micropayments prohibitive.
Paypal tries to avoid these high cost by making it very hard to contact a "real" person. Real people just cost too much. Of course, Paypal's alleged reputation for poor customer service (see paypalsucks.com) is the side effect of trying to keep costs down to enable low-dollar transactions.
Perhaps when someone creates a competent AI for customer service, micropayments could work. Given that most companies still have trouble getting competent people for customer service, I'm not hopeful.
Excel is frozen in time. When people no longer need compatibility with MS Office/OpenOffice, then Excel will die its much-deserved death.
Back in the 1980s I used a wonderful "presentation worksheet" program called Trapeze on the Macintosh. It used named variables instead of row-column references and was insanely powerful. You could position your data variables anywhere you wanted, style and size them independently of other datablocks. The datablocks could even automatically resize if the numbers of rows and columns in the variable changed.
It died in the marketplace because reveiws claimed it wasn't "Excel-like."
Cheap gas enables speed and distance for both goods and people. This has many beneficial effects, including:
- Consumers can afford a wider variety of goods at a lower levels of cost. This means that a person in NY in winter can get Florida orange juice for a modest price.
- Consumers can afford to drive a little farther to find the best goods at the best prices. Rather than be forced to buy from an expensive, small store nearby (as much as I like Mon'n'Pop stores, they are more expensive and offer worse selection), consumers can shop around and buy the best items at the lowest cost.
- Workers can find a better job by traveling a longer distance at higher effective speed -- a fixed commute time, but greater commute distance. Mass transit, in most regions of the country, is much slower than a personal automobile. Our area has a decent mass-transit system, but the effective speed is half that of an automobile due to frequent stops, schedule intervals, and the walk to/from the bus stop. Speed has a quadratic effect: a 2X increase the average speed means 4X the number of possible employers within given maximum commuting time.
- Workers probably can probably get higher pay by finding an employer in their expanded commuting range. With more employers to chose from, a job seeker can probably find an employer who will pay a little more to get that employee's unique combination of skills and experience.
- Employers get better workers. Imagine a company that can only hire people living within a mile of the company versus a company that can tap into a much larger pool of applicants. When employees are mobile, companies get better workers. This translates into more success for the company, shareholders, workers, and greater tax revenues for government projects.
- Companies can tap into suppliers that are further from them. It means that a manufacturer in Arizona can find and buy the best components, even if they are made 2000 miles way in Georgia.
- Likewise, each company can sell goods to a greater part of the U.S. giving them better economies of scale.
The result is both higher standards of living and better economic growth than we would see if we had high gas prices. I'm not saying that gas taxes explain all of the disparity between the U.S. and Europe in terms of economic growth and unemployment rates, but I'd bet its a factor. My point is that low gas prices have under-appreciated, hidden benefits that are good for consumers, good for workers, good for employers, good for companies, and good for the country.I have no idea if these hidden benefits override the hidden costs, but I feel that both sides of the indirect effects must be tallied before declaring that gas/oil should be taxed to inhibit consumption.
There are some species of fungus that attack insects and change the behavior of the victim. The last dying act of the host is to climb to the top of the nearest grass/plant stem bite down on the stem with a death grip and die there. The fungus then sprouts from the body (it looks attractive in a creepy sort of way) . The perch provides a good place for the fungus to disperse its spores.
Within every DRM system there will always be a way for the author to set the copy rights to allow freely made copies. There are always people who want their stuff copied or who don't care or who don't want the recipient encumbered by any restrictions.
That said, PHBs and paternalist OSes from Redmond may decide the implement restrictive DRM settings for their own idiotic reasons. I noticed more than one company annual report that uses a password protected PDF to prevent copy-past operations for who knows what reason. Yet the first time a small content creator's use of DRM causes problems for their big client, the small company will "turn off" DRM.
As long as there are people that want to be heard as far and wide as possible, there will be a public domain.
Except... the whole point of free/open software is that it's /not/ controlled by one overriding personality.
The fluffy ideal that so many try their very best to uphold is that if you mix enough intellect, enthusiasm and good nature together for long enough, something beautiful will result.
Agreed on both counts. But if Linux becomes a popular OS, then it will attract some less fluffy personalities who only see it as a quick way to make a buck. If this idealistic group has no mechanism for ejecting/controlling wayward, sleazy elements, then the group's reputation will quickly sink to that of its worst members.
Moreover, if Linux supporters feel that their efforts are only going toward lining the pockets of a few "Linux" companies, then they will withdraw their support, labors, and love. Controlling the marque is a way to control the integrity of the brand and of the movement.
Suggesting that the mix then requires a high degree of control significantly detracts from this ideal.
Not a high degree of control, but some control, yes.
Either Linux Mark Institute believes in the ideal, in which case truth, justice and the American way will bring about a rosy future for Linux, or it doesn't, in which case it needs to close the source. There is no third way.
Perhaps your post was simply sarcasm. If so, I apologize for taking it seriously. I only think that if Linux wants to be taken seriously, then Linux/Linus/LMI/whoever needs to take the Linux name seriously.
I suspect that some of this is about reputation. If Linux is to become a widely-used, trusted OS, then it needs trustworthy businesses to provide trustworthy services. The first step is to control the name "Linux" so that only those companies that adhere to certain standards, codes of conduct, etc. can be allowed to use the marque. Linus can't control the codebase, but he can control the name.
I'm not saying that the Linux Mark Institute is doing this, but it is what they should do as part of the Linux maturation process.
The explanation is not quite right.
Antireflection coatings have a thickness of 1/4 lambda so that half the light that would normally be reflected is reflected with 180degrees phase shift. Thus for a single wavelength (v-Coating) it is possible to reduce reflection from 4% to less than 0.1%. For a broader range of wavelengths (U-coating) a number of coatings of different thicknesses are used.
Yes, a 1/4 lambda film maximizes antireflection but a thicker film also works -- reducing reflection from 4% to 2%.
The coating itself (typically CaF) is chosen because it is relatively easy to vapour-deposit to controlled thickness and because its refractive index is halfway between that of air and glass.
Actually CaF2 doesn't have a very good index (1.44). MgF2 is a bit better at 1.38. Neither are half-way for normal glass, but they do work well with higher index glasses.
Somehow I don't believe that the same effect could be achieved by a thin film of water, though it's probably better than nothing.
Water's index of 1.33 makes it better than MgF2 or CaF2 as an anti-reflective coating. I'm not sure how the anti-fog coating changes the index, though.
Their claim is valid. Anytime light passes through an abrupt change in the index of refraction (e.g., from air to glass), a percentage of the light it reflected back. That's why you see a ghost image of yourself in even "transparent" pieces of glass. On ordinary glass, about 4% of the light is reflected (removed) by each air-to-glass or glass-to-air interface (8% for each pane).
Adding a anti-reflective coating that has an intermediate index of refraction can reduce this. Nonlinearities in the reflection process mean that two interfaces of lesser change reflect far less than one big change. Camera lens makers do this all the time because many lens have 6 to 20 pieces of glass and thus a dozen or more interfaces that each would to attenuate light and create multiple internal reflections between the lens elements.
It may not be much, but that antifog coating probably lets a couple extra percent of the light through.
IANAL, but if a gun maker named their pistol "Felon's Favorite"(TM) or "Rob-Rite"(TM), then I'm sure they would be susceptible to either civil or criminal legal pleasantries.
Are there legitimate uses of this code? If so, then why didn't the author market it strictly for those uses and name it something a little less felonious than "Lover Spy?"
Given all the concern with rootkits, backdoors, worms, spyware, et al, it would seem that a nonflash-ROM bootloader could provide a secure micro-OS that in turn checks and helps maintain the integrity of the main OS. A boot-time diagnostic and some key read-only API code segments (encompassing access to crucial functions such as encryption, hash calculation, memory access, disk access, UI access, network access, etc.) would help ensure that the main OS was not compromised and was less susceptible to malware.
A small OS, even one with a GUI, can fit in less than a MB. Perhaps a heavily secured, stripped-down copy of some stable version of *nix could provide a high-integrity read-only core underlying a more sophisticated, extensible, and flexible full-featured OS.
I'd want to see how the material handles long-term exposure to vacuum and large temperature swings before using it in any space-borne structural applications. Most plastics contain plasticizers that help improve flexibility and handling properties, but which slowly evaporate leaving the material brittle (anyone ever see what happens to a plastic milk jug left in the sun for a year?). Moreover, plastics tend to have structural properties that are very temperature sensitive -- at modestly high temperatures, plastics slowly stretch to failure, at modestly low temperatures, they fracture. The "temperature" in space is strongly dependent on whether the surface is facing the sun or not. It's baking hot on the sunny side and freezing cold on the shady side -- not a good environment for plastics.
The history of material science is the history of failures such as the catastrophic failure discovered in Liberty ship hulls in cold North Atlantic waters (learning that some steel alloys are brittle in low temperatures) to the Comet airplane crashes (learning that aluminum fatigues from repeat cycles of stress). I can only hope that NASA does something like LDEF with this material before depending on it to hold its properties for several years of space-exposure.
Being disconnected from 911 because you refused to acknowledge a letter saying that you run the risk of being disconnected from 911 if you rely on VOIP.
Only a world-class bureaucracy could come up with this idea.
I hope that web designers don't assume that the sound is on and try to transmit important information via voice because on my computer it is not.
Does HTTP, etc. offer anyway for a web page to check if sound is even on? If not, then sound is only useful for useless background audio.
Personally, I think voice is a horrible one-to-many communication medium because it is intrusive and linear -- its not browsable. It's like all those horrible Flash animations that slow down the user to a 1st grade reading level while you wait for the words to swirl/materialize into place.
Please keep the web self-paced (not designer-paced).
The real promise of androids won't be realized until people get implants in the first few months of life. That is when the brain is the most plastic -- a blank slate that could learn how to interpret signals from a laser-ranging scanner or to innately operate some novel effector in the world (e.g., brain-stem connected keyboard). Such early-age androids would be able to use their augmentations as seamlessly as most people see or walk -- they just won't have to think about it. I'm not saying that older people can't learn (although in the cases of some phonemes, it is a problem), only that the full opportunity for the higher performance will come when androids have from-birth experience with artificial augmentation.
The ethical issues are horrible but not insurmountable -- current societies would lock away any parent that tried to implant experimental hardware into their baby. But I wonder if research on prosthetic devices -- implanted in babies who are accident/cancer victims -- will reveal how powerfully a young mind can make use of artificially attached hardware. With valid data on the value of the device, people (and society) may be less frightened of early-age augmentation.
As with the Turing test, the entire purpose of a captcha is to distinguish humans from machines. As captcha-defeaters improve, the captchas will need to become more and more sophisticated and require more and more human or human-like intelligence to process. This arms race will culminate in a Turing test-like approach for discerning natural intelligences from artificial ones.
The ultimate irony may occur when the first human-intelligent computer is created by a spammer for the purpose of assaulting our collective intelligences with their commerical drivel. Given the increasing value of online commerce and Google page ranking, there's probably more money in AI for captchas than AI for academic research.
But before captchas get that sophisticated, the system will become self-defeating as the number of real humans defeated by captchas exceeds the number of AIs repelled by them.
If Google is draining talent, forcing pay raises and making it hard for start-ups, then it only means that the system is working. Money (and people) go where they are appreciated in a free, capitalist economy. If the start-ups have a better (more valuable) idea than Google's then they should be able to convince both prospective employees and VCs that they start-up is worth it.
Although economies aren't zero-sum games (many activities do grow the pie, or raise the tide that floats all boats), some aspects do have a win-lose component to them. Successful companies can afford (and should afford) to pay their workers more than unsuccessful ones. This means that successful companies will inevitably harm less successful companies by "draining" the labor pool and seem "evil."
If Google is evil it is because change is evil (to some) and because competition (for money, workers, customers, etc.) can be evil -- at least in the eyes of the less successful.
Disclaimer: I'm not a Google shareholder (their stock seems very overpriced relative to the long-term risks of Google's business model and the high expected earning built into the current stock price), but they do seem to be very successful.
Thanks for the clarification. (not that I construed it to be legal advice) ;)
On a FreeBSD system, you can set the "immutable flag" on a file. Given a high enough system securelevel, that file will be completely resistant to change (including unsetting that flag). This is extremely handy for locking down file signature databases, kernel files, and other likely targets for stealth modification. So long as that portion of the kernel stands intact, the system can never be completely clandestinely owned
Very interesting. This FAQ suggest that OS X retains BSD's immutable flag. In theory, the only way to change this flag in OS X is to reboot in single-user mode. I wonder if a rootkit could force a reboot into single user mode, change these flags, and reboot back to remotely own an OS X machine? I would assume that unless the rootkit can insert something into the single-user mode start-up sequence, the system immutable flag should be fairly safe. The big downside would be that System Update would cease to work (and probably create a corrupt partial update) if the wrong file were locked in this way (security vs. ease-of-use again!).