Although its possible that they underestimated demand, I'd be more likely to believe that they manufactured enough for the holidays but wanted to manufacture a perception of scarcity.
Nothing sells product like an air of exclusiveness.
And before people think I'm trolling Amazon, I think this practice is good for both customers and the company -- the customers get something "hot" and the company sells in volume.
Do fancy locks attract thieves?
on
Spying On Tor
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Perhaps the problem is that using an anonymizer makes someone a more interesting target to authorities. Like the old adage of attacking the bank because "that's where the money is," perhaps some people are attacking Tor because "that's where the secrets are."
I hope Colbert's candidacy and its high level of support serve a large clue-stick to the entrenched political parties. A large number of people are so sick and tired of politics as usual that they are willing to support anyone who is unusual.
Somehow I doubt the Republicrats and Democans will listen to this warning, though. I remember in college when a local comic-strip character (Hank the Hallucination, no less) won the student government presidential election (beating Paul Begala who went on to serve Clinton). All the budding young politicos were incensed that their resume-padding ambitions were being damaged by the will of the student body. But it didn't really change anything then and a fear Colbert short-lived candidacy won't change much now (but I can hope!).
First, This will only work if the resonance breaks the bonds inside the proteins that create the subunits that self-assemble into the viral capsids. If the resonance only separates the weakly-bound subunits, then the resulting fragments will tend to re-self-assemble into whole viruses again. To use a bricks and mortar analogy -- if the device only breaks the mortar, the bricks can reused. The trick is to break the bricks.
Second, this solution requires a specific pulse frequency for each virus. It's not a broad-spectrum disinfectant. That suggests that viruses can easily evolve to defeat the device. Mutants that add a few non-functional amino acids to their capsid protein chains or that decorate the capsid surface with different biochemical groups would change the resonant frequency and allow mutants to escape and breed. One can even imagine evolution selecting for viruses that have inherent damping so that no resonant frequency can build enough energy to disrupt the shell. For example, a virus might become effectively heterozygous so that its shell is randomly constructed of two slightly different subunit sequences. A capsid that is not perfectly crystalline would lack a strong resonant frequency and escape disruption.
Overall, this looks like a very promising weapon in the on-going arms race against viruses.
This has been discussed before. Modern flash drives use wear leveling to avoid writing to well-worn blocks and to move unchanging files from unworn blocks so they can be used more. Yes, it adds complexity and yes it slightly delays the write process. But it's invisible to the CPU and OS and takes far less time that it would to move the heads of the standard mechanical HD. An SSD is free to organize blocks in any order in the address space because there is virtually no penalty for fragmentation.
I think you will find that even in very heavy use applications (e.g. working with HD video or using the SSD for virtual memory) that the lifespan of these drives be longer than a decade (and longer than mechanical HDs). Moreover, they will fail gracefully as blocks become tags as worn.
The high latitude of Nova Scotia makes it more costly to launch for an equatorial orbit. Getting to GEO or lower-latitude LEO orbit would require more fuel. There's a reason why Arianes launch from French Guiana and not Europe.
I suspect that his algorithms require very very careful analysis of the cross-talk environment to remove its effects. The result is a very high-gain function on the high-frequencies to correct for crosstalk and modulation effects at high bandwidths. That's fine in a controlled environment, but won't work if the amount of crosstalk varies dynamically. Temperature, wind, rain, ice, humidity, and squirrels all change the crosstalk characteristics.
I did not mean to cast aspersions on the storage industry. They've worked extremely hard to create hardware-layer reliability and robust backup/restore processes because the fate of a storage company rests on reliability.
Instead, I'd argue that the more insidious type of fault would occur in the apps layer, probably during or after a Version++ migration. Creeping corruption in Yahoo/Microsoft/Google data structures would render the data backups only incrementally less corrupted than the production copy of the data. Unless these systems use a application layer journalling process that can roll-back and roll-forward all the user actions since the version migration, the corruption would cause data loss that no conventional storage system backup can recover from.
I can understand using these services as a backup, but as people shift more and more of their online life to web 2.0, they will find that less and less of their files/data/structured products reside on their own local PC. How many people have a full backup of their Flickr albums (with all the organization structures and metadata that they've enter into flickr?) How many people have a full backup of their GMail accounts? These systems are just one botched upgrade away from data loss (does Google or its competitors have a full backup of ALL users' mail service data and will the restore process actual work?)
I also wonder at what point in time will internet criminals shift their attentions to online services such as Hotmail/Yahoo/GMail as a means of hosting spam/scam operations. A smart scammer could parasitize a group of GMail accounts and send out a few spams a day from each account from a million accounts at once. As long as the scammer obfuscates their emails (use Picassa to create CAPTCHA-like GIF spam) so that the Gmail doesn't notice a million identical emails being sent for a million accounts, the parasite process can survive. And if a criminal finds a way to create an internal GMail worm (one that can propagate itself from account to account without any interaction by the account holder), then they can turn the entire GMail system into a botnet.
My point is that these massive system have some serious single-points of failure and are becoming extremely high-value targets for internet criminals.
The TSA seems to be doing all it can to kill the U.S. economy by making travel even more of a nightmare. I know plenty of business travelers that don't know their schedule 72 hours in advance -- they go where ever they are needed when ever they are needed. The more red tape a country throws down at the border, the less business that people will do here.
I'm sure bin Laden is laughing in his cave right now. He's used a classic martial arts move -- using the strength of the opponent against the opponent. Bin Laden wants to the isolate the U.S. from the world and the TSA is doing a great job of that.
Seth Shostak ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Shostak ) is a very entertaining and informative speaker of SETI topcis. See/hear him if you get a chance. He's a fun combo of dry, acerbic, and self-deprecating.
As much as I loved the idea, these people were not engineers or this would never have happened. For all the jokes about "rocket science," reliable rocket design isn't that hard. The forces from the engine are known from the manufacturer, the aerodynamic forces are relatively easy to estimate, checking stability is simple (basic childhood rocketry books tell you how), the forces inside the structure aren't that hard to work out, and the material strengths can be looked up or discovered with a few tests. The point is that engineering lets one design something that just works. Sure, if one really wants to push the envelope on performance (e.g., the highest performance engines on the lightest possible structures), then it becomes necessary to do some testing, but by the time a full-scale model is done, the chances of success should be fairly high (and the risk of failure known).
With a bit of thought, pencil, paper, and a calculator (or slide rule) these folks could have built an X-Wing that really flew well again and again. But perhaps that wasn't their goal. Sometimes the goal is just to watch stuff blow up.
I doubt this will have the impact that it would if Microsoft were a traditional bricks-and-mortar company. Does this closure prevent Ecuadorians from activating copies of Windows, or downloading updates, or buying additional Microsoft licenses online?
At what point in time will tax authorities seek the right to seize a company's domain name and DNS entries to truly seize a business for back taxes.
I, for one, appreciate your taking the 10 minutes to explain this and would mod you up if I hadn't already commented in this thread. I still dislike Flash because it takes away my ability to search for and browse information on my terms, but I feel better knowing that the technology is not inherently insecure.
Why in the world should the Flash player have any kind of access/execution/write privileges on the browser's machine? I can understand that the player needs to be able to execute some form of code to create interactivity, but shouldn't this be so totally sandboxed that presents a minimal threat to the user or the OS.
This just confirms my opinion that Flash is an evil cancer on the web designed to move control of the web experience from the person browsing to the Flash author (who maybe a botnet builder).
This just demonstrates that owning a connection or bit of network infrastructure isn't worth much because it's too easy to find an alternative connection. The same "route around damage" ethos of the internet makes it a "route around cost" mechanism too. Skype users, like all good internet routers, only pick the Skype connection when it's free. This is why we see such battles with the telcos trying to change the playing field (e.g., lobbying hard to prevent net neutrality and open access regs) so that they can charge more than the marginal price (which is near zero per added user) for use of their infrastructure (which costs millions or billions to build).
First, what kind of clueless idiot runs an update on a hacked device after being told explicitly that running the update on a hacked device will brick said device. Second, what kind of feature phone/PDA maker creates a device that doesn't include a usable SDK and APIs so that developers can add functionality without compromising the core firmware and creating the brick-on-update problem.
Both sides have shown less than stellar judgment and both sides will lose. I suspect that the iPhone plaintiffs will lose their case and Apple will lose a chunk of market-share opportunity.
Perhaps the signal was manmade. And if the signal saturated the detector, then it's even harder to judge the waveform and deduce what caused it. TFA says the frequency shifted during the pulse. That's not uncommon in the pulses used in radar which may been on a passing plane or satellite. Even if the frequency bands are different, the harmonic effect means that a strong source of one frequency may appear as a weak source of a different frequency. Either that, or someone made microwave popcorn on a lonely night and wouldn't confess.
A modest-size physical keyboard with a supplementary battery would make the iPhone (and iPod touch) a very nice ultra-ultra-portable. I'm thinking something analogous to the LandWare GoType Portable Keyboard or the Stowaway Portable Keyboard that was so nice on the old Palm Pilots. An added battery could boost the iPhone life to 10-20 hours of active screen and data use for a full day's (or long-flight's) use of the machine. Sitting on the keyboard in landscape mode, the unit would work well for email, taking notes, webmail, chat, discussion forums and other text-based editing. (I'd also love to see OmniOutliner on the iPhone).
I know Apple probably won't make this product, but (please, please, please) I hope some third party creates this.
This is an interesting business strategy that plays to AMD's ability to sell partially-defective quad-core dies (confirmed by AMD in http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9780049-37.html). It should let AMD increase revenues per wafer, offer a nice mid-performance product, and play some product mix games with clocking -- selling a processor as either a higher speed triple-core or a lower-speed quadcore chip. And there's no reason why core count must be powers of two or even or anything.
Yet I can't help but wonder if customers will think twice about buying a 75% functional chip. It will be interesting to see how AMD spins this and how customers receive the product.
This is a great start to estimating the contribution of fair use to the economy, but it misses two issues. First, fair use will only occur if original works are created and original works will only be created if people have some chance of earning a living from them. Saying that the contribution of fair use exceeds that of copyright should imply more fair use and less copyright is like saying we don't need to pay Boeing and Airbus, because flying (not making planes) contributes more to the economy. The larger point is that the value of fair use is a multiplier on the value of copyrighted material and that's what makes the analysis so hard. By this study's numbers, each dollar of copyrighted material generates another $2 or $3. So anything that leads to another $1 of paid copyright material should add even more fair use value.
Second, the real model needs to consider the trade-off (not the relative numbers). That is, if a given avenue of fair use is curtained by x% (e.g., add another year to copyright protection or prohibit consumer copying of music beyond device shifting) how much does the economic contribution by fair use drop and how much does the contribution of copyright increase? I'll be the first to say that I don't know the answer to that and that this study doesn't answer it.
In looking at the trade-off we need a model that reflects how added fair-use may increases the value multiplier, but may decrease the incentive to create copyrighted material and the pool of copyrighted material. This might vary according to both the nature of the work and the nature of the fair use restriction. For example, I'd argue that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft wouldn't lose much if copyright terms were extended by a hundred years -- that aspect of copyright does not effect them much. And would Microsoft lose money if music sharing were impossible? Internet companies might even make more money if all music copying involved some payment (handled by an internet company). The Fair Use multiplier would not change by much even if some types of fair use were curtailed. On the other hand, these companies would lose a great deal if strict interpretations of copyright meant that every transient copy of a piece of text (e.g., copies in RAM, server caches, and internet routers) had to be subject to some copyright fee paid to a MAFIAA-like organization.
This study is a great start, but we need a better model of the marginal effects of the change in total economic value created as a function of more or less fair use. At the very least, this study proves we need some fair use but it does not prove whether we have enough fair use or too little fair use.
I wouldn't assume that these fingerprints are as unique or pattern-less as one might hope (a fact discussed in the pdf). All of the RAM chips from a given wafer or given mask may share tendencies toward some patterns of the probability of a 0 or 1. These patterns may appear as correlations between rows and columns of a given chip. Location on the wafer (in the context of nonuniformities of exposure to fab chemicals) might also systematically affect the aggregate probabilities of 0 or 1 or the repeatability of the fingerprint. The quality of these fingerprints to be consistent or random might change from run to run and from manufacturer to manufacturer. Finally, I'd bet that the probabilities vary systematically with temperature -- e.g., the probability of a 1 increases for all bits as the chip's temperature increases.
This is a very interesting phenomenon, but a lot more data is needed to show that it provides consistent behavior.
These pronouncements seem to assume that there is only one type of intelligence. Although creating a "smart" machine that can invent other machines is really cool, said machine may lack the political and social skills needed to make a difference. A smart machine might build a better mousetrap, but not be able to do the marketing/acvertising/negotiating/lobbying needed to get the invention adopted by people.
As an aside, the first "human-level" intelligence will take at least 15-25 years (after assembly of the initial hardware & software) to be useful because that's how long it takes a human-level-intelligence (aka a human) to ingest and process all the sensory data/experience with the world to reach a productive level of knowledge. One can even argue that the first machines will need "sleep" time as part of the sensory/experience/memory integration process, so being "on" 24/7 won't be as big a benefit as might first seem. If Moore's law cooperates, the time-to-experience might be reduced, but only if there are no delays in translating the early-year results to later platforms and no emulation penalties (imagine if your task was to transplant a fully-loaded 20-year-old computer platform, e.g., a Sun 3 with a proprietary codebase, into today's hardware -- it would take time and would not run as fast as the relative clock speeds suggest).
Unfortunately, most companies see IT as a "cost" that should be minimized. Any extra expenditure for any extra features needs a champion, a proposal, a business case, documentation of ROI, prototypes, roll-out plans, risk reduction documents, etc. etc. IT departments live under this constant cost-avoidance mandate and become quite averse to anything that might create more work (= more costs) because they know they'll have jump through hoops to justify the extra cost.
If the IT department in your company is an obstacle for your job, realize that it's because the people that control the purse strings for IT (e.g., the CEO, COO, CFO, et al) don't understand that IT can provide a huge opportunity to boost productivity, revenues, and profits. But until someone goes to them with a solid business case and demonstrable ROI for whatever tech du jour, the C-level suits and the IT dept will stay in cost-avoidance (vs. opportunity-seeking) mode of management.
Even at only 1,000 writes of reliable lifespan, 48 GB could handle 48 TB of writes or over 4,000 hours of continuous writing of compressed HD video (or about 2 years of 40 hr/week writes of a video stream). Checking my average usage of disk I/O finds that I only average about 2 GB of writes per day which would suggest that this device would last me 24,000 days (or 65 years). And if the life is 10,000 or 100,000, then I'd see 10X or 100X that lifespan.
Your mileage may vary, but I'd bet that 99% of users would never keep their computer (especially a laptop that is the more likely application for flash-based drives) for long enough to see the disk fail from wear.
Slashdot Mirror
Although its possible that they underestimated demand, I'd be more likely to believe that they manufactured enough for the holidays but wanted to manufacture a perception of scarcity.
Nothing sells product like an air of exclusiveness.
And before people think I'm trolling Amazon, I think this practice is good for both customers and the company -- the customers get something "hot" and the company sells in volume.
Perhaps the problem is that using an anonymizer makes someone a more interesting target to authorities. Like the old adage of attacking the bank because "that's where the money is," perhaps some people are attacking Tor because "that's where the secrets are."
I hope Colbert's candidacy and its high level of support serve a large clue-stick to the entrenched political parties. A large number of people are so sick and tired of politics as usual that they are willing to support anyone who is unusual.
Somehow I doubt the Republicrats and Democans will listen to this warning, though. I remember in college when a local comic-strip character (Hank the Hallucination, no less) won the student government presidential election (beating Paul Begala who went on to serve Clinton). All the budding young politicos were incensed that their resume-padding ambitions were being damaged by the will of the student body. But it didn't really change anything then and a fear Colbert short-lived candidacy won't change much now (but I can hope!).
First, This will only work if the resonance breaks the bonds inside the proteins that create the subunits that self-assemble into the viral capsids. If the resonance only separates the weakly-bound subunits, then the resulting fragments will tend to re-self-assemble into whole viruses again. To use a bricks and mortar analogy -- if the device only breaks the mortar, the bricks can reused. The trick is to break the bricks.
Second, this solution requires a specific pulse frequency for each virus. It's not a broad-spectrum disinfectant. That suggests that viruses can easily evolve to defeat the device. Mutants that add a few non-functional amino acids to their capsid protein chains or that decorate the capsid surface with different biochemical groups would change the resonant frequency and allow mutants to escape and breed. One can even imagine evolution selecting for viruses that have inherent damping so that no resonant frequency can build enough energy to disrupt the shell. For example, a virus might become effectively heterozygous so that its shell is randomly constructed of two slightly different subunit sequences. A capsid that is not perfectly crystalline would lack a strong resonant frequency and escape disruption.
Overall, this looks like a very promising weapon in the on-going arms race against viruses.
This has been discussed before. Modern flash drives use wear leveling to avoid writing to well-worn blocks and to move unchanging files from unworn blocks so they can be used more. Yes, it adds complexity and yes it slightly delays the write process. But it's invisible to the CPU and OS and takes far less time that it would to move the heads of the standard mechanical HD. An SSD is free to organize blocks in any order in the address space because there is virtually no penalty for fragmentation.
I think you will find that even in very heavy use applications (e.g. working with HD video or using the SSD for virtual memory) that the lifespan of these drives be longer than a decade (and longer than mechanical HDs). Moreover, they will fail gracefully as blocks become tags as worn.
The high latitude of Nova Scotia makes it more costly to launch for an equatorial orbit. Getting to GEO or lower-latitude LEO orbit would require more fuel. There's a reason why Arianes launch from French Guiana and not Europe.
I suspect that his algorithms require very very careful analysis of the cross-talk environment to remove its effects. The result is a very high-gain function on the high-frequencies to correct for crosstalk and modulation effects at high bandwidths. That's fine in a controlled environment, but won't work if the amount of crosstalk varies dynamically. Temperature, wind, rain, ice, humidity, and squirrels all change the crosstalk characteristics.
I did not mean to cast aspersions on the storage industry. They've worked extremely hard to create hardware-layer reliability and robust backup/restore processes because the fate of a storage company rests on reliability.
Instead, I'd argue that the more insidious type of fault would occur in the apps layer, probably during or after a Version++ migration. Creeping corruption in Yahoo/Microsoft/Google data structures would render the data backups only incrementally less corrupted than the production copy of the data. Unless these systems use a application layer journalling process that can roll-back and roll-forward all the user actions since the version migration, the corruption would cause data loss that no conventional storage system backup can recover from.
I can understand using these services as a backup, but as people shift more and more of their online life to web 2.0, they will find that less and less of their files/data/structured products reside on their own local PC. How many people have a full backup of their Flickr albums (with all the organization structures and metadata that they've enter into flickr?) How many people have a full backup of their GMail accounts? These systems are just one botched upgrade away from data loss (does Google or its competitors have a full backup of ALL users' mail service data and will the restore process actual work?)
I also wonder at what point in time will internet criminals shift their attentions to online services such as Hotmail/Yahoo/GMail as a means of hosting spam/scam operations. A smart scammer could parasitize a group of GMail accounts and send out a few spams a day from each account from a million accounts at once. As long as the scammer obfuscates their emails (use Picassa to create CAPTCHA-like GIF spam) so that the Gmail doesn't notice a million identical emails being sent for a million accounts, the parasite process can survive. And if a criminal finds a way to create an internal GMail worm (one that can propagate itself from account to account without any interaction by the account holder), then they can turn the entire GMail system into a botnet.
My point is that these massive system have some serious single-points of failure and are becoming extremely high-value targets for internet criminals.
The TSA seems to be doing all it can to kill the U.S. economy by making travel even more of a nightmare. I know plenty of business travelers that don't know their schedule 72 hours in advance -- they go where ever they are needed when ever they are needed. The more red tape a country throws down at the border, the less business that people will do here.
I'm sure bin Laden is laughing in his cave right now. He's used a classic martial arts move -- using the strength of the opponent against the opponent. Bin Laden wants to the isolate the U.S. from the world and the TSA is doing a great job of that.
Seth Shostak ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Shostak ) is a very entertaining and informative speaker of SETI topcis. See/hear him if you get a chance. He's a fun combo of dry, acerbic, and self-deprecating.
As much as I loved the idea, these people were not engineers or this would never have happened. For all the jokes about "rocket science," reliable rocket design isn't that hard. The forces from the engine are known from the manufacturer, the aerodynamic forces are relatively easy to estimate, checking stability is simple (basic childhood rocketry books tell you how), the forces inside the structure aren't that hard to work out, and the material strengths can be looked up or discovered with a few tests. The point is that engineering lets one design something that just works. Sure, if one really wants to push the envelope on performance (e.g., the highest performance engines on the lightest possible structures), then it becomes necessary to do some testing, but by the time a full-scale model is done, the chances of success should be fairly high (and the risk of failure known).
With a bit of thought, pencil, paper, and a calculator (or slide rule) these folks could have built an X-Wing that really flew well again and again. But perhaps that wasn't their goal. Sometimes the goal is just to watch stuff blow up.
I doubt this will have the impact that it would if Microsoft were a traditional bricks-and-mortar company. Does this closure prevent Ecuadorians from activating copies of Windows, or downloading updates, or buying additional Microsoft licenses online?
At what point in time will tax authorities seek the right to seize a company's domain name and DNS entries to truly seize a business for back taxes.
I, for one, appreciate your taking the 10 minutes to explain this and would mod you up if I hadn't already commented in this thread. I still dislike Flash because it takes away my ability to search for and browse information on my terms, but I feel better knowing that the technology is not inherently insecure.
Why in the world should the Flash player have any kind of access/execution/write privileges on the browser's machine? I can understand that the player needs to be able to execute some form of code to create interactivity, but shouldn't this be so totally sandboxed that presents a minimal threat to the user or the OS.
This just confirms my opinion that Flash is an evil cancer on the web designed to move control of the web experience from the person browsing to the Flash author (who maybe a botnet builder).
This just demonstrates that owning a connection or bit of network infrastructure isn't worth much because it's too easy to find an alternative connection. The same "route around damage" ethos of the internet makes it a "route around cost" mechanism too. Skype users, like all good internet routers, only pick the Skype connection when it's free. This is why we see such battles with the telcos trying to change the playing field (e.g., lobbying hard to prevent net neutrality and open access regs) so that they can charge more than the marginal price (which is near zero per added user) for use of their infrastructure (which costs millions or billions to build).
First, what kind of clueless idiot runs an update on a hacked device after being told explicitly that running the update on a hacked device will brick said device. Second, what kind of feature phone/PDA maker creates a device that doesn't include a usable SDK and APIs so that developers can add functionality without compromising the core firmware and creating the brick-on-update problem.
Both sides have shown less than stellar judgment and both sides will lose. I suspect that the iPhone plaintiffs will lose their case and Apple will lose a chunk of market-share opportunity.
Perhaps the signal was manmade. And if the signal saturated the detector, then it's even harder to judge the waveform and deduce what caused it. TFA says the frequency shifted during the pulse. That's not uncommon in the pulses used in radar which may been on a passing plane or satellite. Even if the frequency bands are different, the harmonic effect means that a strong source of one frequency may appear as a weak source of a different frequency. Either that, or someone made microwave popcorn on a lonely night and wouldn't confess.
Of course, I've not seen the data and IANARA.
A modest-size physical keyboard with a supplementary battery would make the iPhone (and iPod touch) a very nice ultra-ultra-portable. I'm thinking something analogous to the LandWare GoType Portable Keyboard or the Stowaway Portable Keyboard that was so nice on the old Palm Pilots. An added battery could boost the iPhone life to 10-20 hours of active screen and data use for a full day's (or long-flight's) use of the machine. Sitting on the keyboard in landscape mode, the unit would work well for email, taking notes, webmail, chat, discussion forums and other text-based editing. (I'd also love to see OmniOutliner on the iPhone).
I know Apple probably won't make this product, but (please, please, please) I hope some third party creates this.
This is an interesting business strategy that plays to AMD's ability to sell partially-defective quad-core dies (confirmed by AMD in http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9780049-37.html). It should let AMD increase revenues per wafer, offer a nice mid-performance product, and play some product mix games with clocking -- selling a processor as either a higher speed triple-core or a lower-speed quadcore chip. And there's no reason why core count must be powers of two or even or anything.
Yet I can't help but wonder if customers will think twice about buying a 75% functional chip. It will be interesting to see how AMD spins this and how customers receive the product.
This is a great start to estimating the contribution of fair use to the economy, but it misses two issues. First, fair use will only occur if original works are created and original works will only be created if people have some chance of earning a living from them. Saying that the contribution of fair use exceeds that of copyright should imply more fair use and less copyright is like saying we don't need to pay Boeing and Airbus, because flying (not making planes) contributes more to the economy. The larger point is that the value of fair use is a multiplier on the value of copyrighted material and that's what makes the analysis so hard. By this study's numbers, each dollar of copyrighted material generates another $2 or $3. So anything that leads to another $1 of paid copyright material should add even more fair use value.
Second, the real model needs to consider the trade-off (not the relative numbers). That is, if a given avenue of fair use is curtained by x% (e.g., add another year to copyright protection or prohibit consumer copying of music beyond device shifting) how much does the economic contribution by fair use drop and how much does the contribution of copyright increase? I'll be the first to say that I don't know the answer to that and that this study doesn't answer it.
In looking at the trade-off we need a model that reflects how added fair-use may increases the value multiplier, but may decrease the incentive to create copyrighted material and the pool of copyrighted material. This might vary according to both the nature of the work and the nature of the fair use restriction. For example, I'd argue that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft wouldn't lose much if copyright terms were extended by a hundred years -- that aspect of copyright does not effect them much. And would Microsoft lose money if music sharing were impossible? Internet companies might even make more money if all music copying involved some payment (handled by an internet company). The Fair Use multiplier would not change by much even if some types of fair use were curtailed. On the other hand, these companies would lose a great deal if strict interpretations of copyright meant that every transient copy of a piece of text (e.g., copies in RAM, server caches, and internet routers) had to be subject to some copyright fee paid to a MAFIAA-like organization.
This study is a great start, but we need a better model of the marginal effects of the change in total economic value created as a function of more or less fair use. At the very least, this study proves we need some fair use but it does not prove whether we have enough fair use or too little fair use.
I wouldn't assume that these fingerprints are as unique or pattern-less as one might hope (a fact discussed in the pdf). All of the RAM chips from a given wafer or given mask may share tendencies toward some patterns of the probability of a 0 or 1. These patterns may appear as correlations between rows and columns of a given chip. Location on the wafer (in the context of nonuniformities of exposure to fab chemicals) might also systematically affect the aggregate probabilities of 0 or 1 or the repeatability of the fingerprint. The quality of these fingerprints to be consistent or random might change from run to run and from manufacturer to manufacturer. Finally, I'd bet that the probabilities vary systematically with temperature -- e.g., the probability of a 1 increases for all bits as the chip's temperature increases.
This is a very interesting phenomenon, but a lot more data is needed to show that it provides consistent behavior.
These pronouncements seem to assume that there is only one type of intelligence. Although creating a "smart" machine that can invent other machines is really cool, said machine may lack the political and social skills needed to make a difference. A smart machine might build a better mousetrap, but not be able to do the marketing/acvertising/negotiating/lobbying needed to get the invention adopted by people.
As an aside, the first "human-level" intelligence will take at least 15-25 years (after assembly of the initial hardware & software) to be useful because that's how long it takes a human-level-intelligence (aka a human) to ingest and process all the sensory data/experience with the world to reach a productive level of knowledge. One can even argue that the first machines will need "sleep" time as part of the sensory/experience/memory integration process, so being "on" 24/7 won't be as big a benefit as might first seem. If Moore's law cooperates, the time-to-experience might be reduced, but only if there are no delays in translating the early-year results to later platforms and no emulation penalties (imagine if your task was to transplant a fully-loaded 20-year-old computer platform, e.g., a Sun 3 with a proprietary codebase, into today's hardware -- it would take time and would not run as fast as the relative clock speeds suggest).
Unfortunately, most companies see IT as a "cost" that should be minimized. Any extra expenditure for any extra features needs a champion, a proposal, a business case, documentation of ROI, prototypes, roll-out plans, risk reduction documents, etc. etc. IT departments live under this constant cost-avoidance mandate and become quite averse to anything that might create more work (= more costs) because they know they'll have jump through hoops to justify the extra cost.
If the IT department in your company is an obstacle for your job, realize that it's because the people that control the purse strings for IT (e.g., the CEO, COO, CFO, et al) don't understand that IT can provide a huge opportunity to boost productivity, revenues, and profits. But until someone goes to them with a solid business case and demonstrable ROI for whatever tech du jour, the C-level suits and the IT dept will stay in cost-avoidance (vs. opportunity-seeking) mode of management.
Even at only 1,000 writes of reliable lifespan, 48 GB could handle 48 TB of writes or over 4,000 hours of continuous writing of compressed HD video (or about 2 years of 40 hr/week writes of a video stream). Checking my average usage of disk I/O finds that I only average about 2 GB of writes per day which would suggest that this device would last me 24,000 days (or 65 years). And if the life is 10,000 or 100,000, then I'd see 10X or 100X that lifespan.
Your mileage may vary, but I'd bet that 99% of users would never keep their computer (especially a laptop that is the more likely application for flash-based drives) for long enough to see the disk fail from wear.