If Amazon shows consumers this tiered fee/tax (and the tech support number of the offending ISP), I can't help but think that ISP will soon discover that the fee/tax is unprofitable.
Let the market decide, but ensure that consumers have all the facts and tools to affect the decision.
Just put a daily event in iCal with an alarm that sends an e-mail to yourself. Unless the thieves reinstall the OS (doubtful as I'd bet that most theives just want quick cash for their swag), the machine will send out an email to you everyday from its new location.
The sooner the competition sees a company's patent application, the sooner they can create further innovations that build-on or work-around the proposed patent. That's one of the cool things about a patent - it forces the applicant to disclose the invention so that other can innovate further.
There may be laws that require insurance companies to provide group insurance to businesses in your state or offer insurance to otherwise uninsurable people. Colorado, for one, has laws that enable a self-employed person to get group insurance regardless of prior health history-- the only trick is that you can only get it in the month of your birthday. Colorado, for one, also maintains an insurance plan for high risk individuals who prove they can't get individual health insurance.
IANAL, but you might want to look more carefully at your state's insurance regulations before you give up on starting a business.
I use the Motorola v360, a USB cable and t-Mobile. The plan I use is a bit more expensive, $29.99/mo but includes both unlimited cellphone data use and unlimited t-Mobile Hotspot Wifi. The service has been fine, although it was a royal pain to find a t-Mobile service rep that knew how to provision the account with the service plan that was in the brochure.
I wonder if this is really that good a thing. I would bet that some people would love to get their hands of the login info of an FBI agent -- it would provide access to data for some serious ID theft, terrorism, fraud, organized crime, etc. All it would take is one agent succumbing to a bit of social engineering.
The problem with the FBI using public protocols on public networks is that it opens non-public data to some serious technological and human security holes.
I have 5-gallon bottle of water, algae, moss, various aquatic creatures and about a dozen styrofoam peanuts. Its a nearly closed self-maintaining ecosystem that my wife calls my "pet dirty water." After some 10 years, peanuts are almost 2/3 gone -- eroded by something in the water. 10 years may seem like a long time, but compared to scare-tactic predictions of that styrofoam never goes away, this article (and my aquarium) proves otherwise.
Both studies are "right". Some coffee may be good for you, too much may be bad -- the human body is nonlinear. Some people may react well to coffee, some people react poorly -- the human gene poll is heterogeneous.
I hope this research isn't used to regulate or litigate cell phones out of existence. Life is risky and it should be up to individuals to make their own informed decisions about how they live their lives. People should be able to make personal trade-offs regarding safety, productivity, life-activity, and life-span.
Of course if "second-hand cell radiation" gets cell phones banned from public places, then I could see more demand for regulation just to force people to shut-up.
You should be asking the question the other way around:
How can foreign suppliers, distributors, and customers connect to them?
That's a very good point. I'd say that China needs Western customers more than Western companies need China.
Currently, China offers a commodity -- cheap labor -- that is not unique. Other Asian countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Thailand, and Vietnam would love take business away from China. Countries in South America and Africa also provide cheap labor. Thus, Western companies have a world of alternatives that they will weigh on the basis of cost. Thus anything that makes China more expensive makes China less attractive relative to other providers of labor.
China, on the other hand, has no credible alternatives for its growing industrial output inside of this new Chinese internet zone. Domestic demand can't take the place of exports.
This move puts Chinese companies at a competitive disadvantage -- how can they connect to foreign suppliers, distributors, and customers? Will western companies continue to outsource to China if the country puts up too many obstacles to free communication?
At a knowledge management conference, I saw the results of a study of how programmers spend their time at a well-established, very large and profitable software company. They spent 75% of their time using Outlook dealing with emails. Less than a quarter of the time went into using a development environment or testing tools.
The problem is that too many people can reach too many people with too little effort. Every incoming email, IM, or call demands attention and attenuates accomplishment.
I'll admit to a notion unpopular in these realms - I do think patents are good. If someone invests time, money, and ingenuity to create a new commercial product, then they should reap the benefits of that in exchange for making the invention public. Sadly, the current system does not live up to this ideal.
The rise of lawyer-dominated patent holding companies, such as NTP, suggests that the current patent system doesn't do enough to drive mass production of new inventions. These lawsuit-happy companies thrive on the 1% inspiration and attack those that invest the 99% perspiration required to commercialize new ideas.
To discourage "thought-sweatshops" that just invent without investing, I'd bring back the working model requirement for granting a patent. Forcing the inventor to spend real money to create that which was thought up would both encourage commercialization -- pushing the invention to the prototype stage -- and discourage indiscriminate legal land-grabs with blankets of frivolous patents.
If NTP had actually created a competing product to the Blackberry then I would support their challenge of RIM. If one bona fide maker of telecom devices creates something new and innovative, they should be able to patent it and protect it from imitators. That NTP only generated paper, not products, makes me less supportive of their claim.
Soon there will be quantum malware that "runs" even if you never try to open it, even if you kill its process, even if you filter it, even if your packets just pass close to it.
The tech that would make this cool would be multi-touch touchscreen technology. That way people could interact in parallel with the screen, not sequentially.
The ultimate magic would also include some form of RF coupling to screen and table-edge antennas to ascertain which person was touching the screen. When a person touches the screen the induced RF would flow into them and radiate. The table-edge antennas would detect it and estimate where the "toucher" is sitting. Thus, person A couldn't illegally move person B's game pieces because that table. (Anyone want to patent this? Or should I declare it public domain right now?)
To really work, the OS would need some serious hacks to handle true a simultaneous multi-user UI. It would need the ultimate in "fast user switching" while maintaining/enforcing a cross-user logical UI state for multiple users of a single screen. (More patents anyone?)
I'm sure they tried very very hard to create a feel-good phrase but "cultural environmentalism" doesn't work. Ecological environmentalism seeks to prevent any human-made effects in ecological systems -- preventing any human-made changes to pristine ecologies and removing the effects of humans from sullied ecologies. The true parallel that could be considered "cultural environmentalism" might include splitting or censoring the internet to prevent the flow of "deleterious" culture from one country to another (just like the USDA tries to regulate the import for foriegn plants and animals). Some of the issues raised by Islamic fundamentalism might be true examples of cultural environmentalism in that they seek to avoid pollution from western cultures. The point is that China and Bin Laden are doing more for true "cultural environmentalism" than are Lessig and crew.
This version of "cultural environmentalism" is less about prevention of change or pollution of cultures by "bad" cultural influences and more of an economic fight about who pays and who does for so-called "cultural" properties. Lessig et al have only made use of a positive buzzword.
Its just another example of co-opting a word for its connotations, not its true meaning (like calling every act of violence or non-patriotic idea a "terrorist" threat).
If these science projects can help gather data on the true pros and cons of controversial ideas, then these projects are a good thing.
If these science projects can help inform the public about controversial ideas, then these projects are a good thing.
If these science projects can help train future voters to think rationally about controversial ideas, then these projects are a good thing.
I'm sure that some of the projects may be buzzword laden copies of wikipedia entries, but I applaud those ernest young researchers that tackle tough societally-relevant topics with good science.
I wonder if short copyright terms hurt other artists (i.e., not those whose copyright has lapsed) in indirect ways.
To me, the current world is drowning in media and choice. In many ways, media consumption is a zero-sum game. I can only listen for so many hours per day. Current iPods hold upwards of 1,000 hours of music -- you can listen for 8 hours a day and only hear the same song 3 times a year if you want. This massive supply of music makes each track less valuable.
Think of it this way. When my iPod has 15,000 songs, is the 15,001st song worth that much? For the most part that 15,001st song must be worth far less than $0.99 and maybe less than a penny. Sure, I may have a few hot favs that command a premium but, by and large, an iPod's worth of music provides all the fresh (or relatively fresh to me, that is) music that I could ever hope to listen to.
Short copyright terms help flood the market with large volumes of cheap music and current recording artists will find themselves competing against inexpensive copies of old, great songs.
As a consumer, I want music to be plentiful and cheap. In contrast, an artist wants music (including music created by others) to be rare and expensive.
The intricacies of spreadsheets make them much harder to edit in parallel. On a wikipedia entry it doesn't matter if one person edits something about the history of something while another person expands a section on the future. Aside from minor inconsistencies, which are easy to spot, the document is essentially the sum of its parts.
In contrast, the parts of a spreadsheet have strict dependencies that can span the spreadsheet and affect correctness in subtle ways. For example, if one person adds a row in one section, how should formulas in a different section react (do range references to the row above expand to encompass the new row or do range references to the row below expand or neither?). "Trace dependencies" functions can help but only if each editor recognizes that the scope of their edits is potentially unbounded.
The point is that it's harder to allow simultaneous independent edits because the internals of a spreasheet don't have independence.
The chip industry spends billions in R&D to extend the performance growth of silicon chips. A very large number of engineers know how to design efficient fabs for silicon. Until this technology also attracts a sufficient following of $ and manufacturing experience, I won't count silicon out.
Also, it's not clear that this technology isn't subject to same "limits of Moore's law" (if there is such a thing) as silicon chips. The use of electron-beam lithography would seem to mean that this technology is subject to the some of the same feature-size and practicality limits suffered by silicon chips.
Perhaps this technology will find a place somewhere, it just faces a major uphill battle if it is to supplant silicon.
If **AA prosecutes the original buyer of illegally distributed watermarked copies, then pirate distributors will create malware to steal originals from unsuspecting copy owners. Computer owners that don't secure their machines will find that someone has surreptitiously copied their media files, sold or traded them on the open market and made the owner of the infected machine liable for criminal act.
With only 49 steps of programming memory, 8 data registers, and a 4-level stack, the HP-25 was an gentle introduction to programming in the small. The total lack of non-volatile RAM or secondary storage plus the 3-4 hour battery life sucked, but the machine was still my pride and joy in 1977.
I don't know how many different versions of a prime number generator I wrote or how many times I keyed in the Moon Landing Simulator program.
The problem is all the variants of a given malware. For most users, the signature of the payload is less meaningful than the subject line of the e-mail. A virus email that promises Kama Sutra pictures is "different" from one promising Miss Lebanon even if the underlying payload and behavior is identical.
Perhaps AV experts need to use cladistics with a standardized set of feature dimensions. A cladogram of the virus varients and some threshold distance in feature-space would help segment similar and dissimilar malware.
I actually don't hold out much hope for this because malware is an adaptive threat. Malware creators might (and do) easily take steps to obfuscate their warez -- creating spurious variants for the express purpose of confusing AV software, news reporting, and users. The more variants that appear, the harder it is to counter the threat.
Slashdot Mirror
If Amazon shows consumers this tiered fee/tax (and the tech support number of the offending ISP), I can't help but think that ISP will soon discover that the fee/tax is unprofitable.
Let the market decide, but ensure that consumers have all the facts and tools to affect the decision.
Just put a daily event in iCal with an alarm that sends an e-mail to yourself. Unless the thieves reinstall the OS (doubtful as I'd bet that most theives just want quick cash for their swag), the machine will send out an email to you everyday from its new location.
The sooner the competition sees a company's patent application, the sooner they can create further innovations that build-on or work-around the proposed patent. That's one of the cool things about a patent - it forces the applicant to disclose the invention so that other can innovate further.
There may be laws that require insurance companies to provide group insurance to businesses in your state or offer insurance to otherwise uninsurable people. Colorado, for one, has laws that enable a self-employed person to get group insurance regardless of prior health history-- the only trick is that you can only get it in the month of your birthday. Colorado, for one, also maintains an insurance plan for high risk individuals who prove they can't get individual health insurance.
IANAL, but you might want to look more carefully at your state's insurance regulations before you give up on starting a business.
I use the Motorola v360, a USB cable and t-Mobile. The plan I use is a bit more expensive, $29.99/mo but includes both unlimited cellphone data use and unlimited t-Mobile Hotspot Wifi. The service has been fine, although it was a royal pain to find a t-Mobile service rep that knew how to provision the account with the service plan that was in the brochure.
I wonder if this is really that good a thing. I would bet that some people would love to get their hands of the login info of an FBI agent -- it would provide access to data for some serious ID theft, terrorism, fraud, organized crime, etc. All it would take is one agent succumbing to a bit of social engineering.
The problem with the FBI using public protocols on public networks is that it opens non-public data to some serious technological and human security holes.
I have 5-gallon bottle of water, algae, moss, various aquatic creatures and about a dozen styrofoam peanuts. Its a nearly closed self-maintaining ecosystem that my wife calls my "pet dirty water." After some 10 years, peanuts are almost 2/3 gone -- eroded by something in the water. 10 years may seem like a long time, but compared to scare-tactic predictions of that styrofoam never goes away, this article (and my aquarium) proves otherwise.
Both studies are "right". Some coffee may be good for you, too much may be bad -- the human body is nonlinear. Some people may react well to coffee, some people react poorly -- the human gene poll is heterogeneous.
I hope this research isn't used to regulate or litigate cell phones out of existence. Life is risky and it should be up to individuals to make their own informed decisions about how they live their lives. People should be able to make personal trade-offs regarding safety, productivity, life-activity, and life-span.
Of course if "second-hand cell radiation" gets cell phones banned from public places, then I could see more demand for regulation just to force people to shut-up.
With 9 buttons, a DDR pad could provide 72 chorded input combinations -- more than enough for ASCII+Numeric+Controls.
Although I wouldn't want to write a novel on a DDR pad, it might be a good way to get some exercise during shorter text messaging sessions.
You should be asking the question the other way around: How can foreign suppliers, distributors, and customers connect to them?
That's a very good point. I'd say that China needs Western customers more than Western companies need China.
Currently, China offers a commodity -- cheap labor -- that is not unique. Other Asian countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Thailand, and Vietnam would love take business away from China. Countries in South America and Africa also provide cheap labor. Thus, Western companies have a world of alternatives that they will weigh on the basis of cost. Thus anything that makes China more expensive makes China less attractive relative to other providers of labor.
China, on the other hand, has no credible alternatives for its growing industrial output inside of this new Chinese internet zone. Domestic demand can't take the place of exports.
This move puts Chinese companies at a competitive disadvantage -- how can they connect to foreign suppliers, distributors, and customers? Will western companies continue to outsource to China if the country puts up too many obstacles to free communication?
At a knowledge management conference, I saw the results of a study of how programmers spend their time at a well-established, very large and profitable software company. They spent 75% of their time using Outlook dealing with emails. Less than a quarter of the time went into using a development environment or testing tools.
The problem is that too many people can reach too many people with too little effort. Every incoming email, IM, or call demands attention and attenuates accomplishment.
I'll admit to a notion unpopular in these realms - I do think patents are good. If someone invests time, money, and ingenuity to create a new commercial product, then they should reap the benefits of that in exchange for making the invention public. Sadly, the current system does not live up to this ideal.
The rise of lawyer-dominated patent holding companies, such as NTP, suggests that the current patent system doesn't do enough to drive mass production of new inventions. These lawsuit-happy companies thrive on the 1% inspiration and attack those that invest the 99% perspiration required to commercialize new ideas.
To discourage "thought-sweatshops" that just invent without investing, I'd bring back the working model requirement for granting a patent. Forcing the inventor to spend real money to create that which was thought up would both encourage commercialization -- pushing the invention to the prototype stage -- and discourage indiscriminate legal land-grabs with blankets of frivolous patents.
If NTP had actually created a competing product to the Blackberry then I would support their challenge of RIM. If one bona fide maker of telecom devices creates something new and innovative, they should be able to patent it and protect it from imitators. That NTP only generated paper, not products, makes me less supportive of their claim.
Soon there will be quantum malware that "runs" even if you never try to open it, even if you kill its process, even if you filter it, even if your packets just pass close to it.
For all we know this malware is already running.
The tech that would make this cool would be multi-touch touchscreen technology. That way people could interact in parallel with the screen, not sequentially.
The ultimate magic would also include some form of RF coupling to screen and table-edge antennas to ascertain which person was touching the screen. When a person touches the screen the induced RF would flow into them and radiate. The table-edge antennas would detect it and estimate where the "toucher" is sitting. Thus, person A couldn't illegally move person B's game pieces because that table. (Anyone want to patent this? Or should I declare it public domain right now?)
To really work, the OS would need some serious hacks to handle true a simultaneous multi-user UI. It would need the ultimate in "fast user switching" while maintaining/enforcing a cross-user logical UI state for multiple users of a single screen. (More patents anyone?)
I'm sure they tried very very hard to create a feel-good phrase but "cultural environmentalism" doesn't work. Ecological environmentalism seeks to prevent any human-made effects in ecological systems -- preventing any human-made changes to pristine ecologies and removing the effects of humans from sullied ecologies. The true parallel that could be considered "cultural environmentalism" might include splitting or censoring the internet to prevent the flow of "deleterious" culture from one country to another (just like the USDA tries to regulate the import for foriegn plants and animals). Some of the issues raised by Islamic fundamentalism might be true examples of cultural environmentalism in that they seek to avoid pollution from western cultures. The point is that China and Bin Laden are doing more for true "cultural environmentalism" than are Lessig and crew.
This version of "cultural environmentalism" is less about prevention of change or pollution of cultures by "bad" cultural influences and more of an economic fight about who pays and who does for so-called "cultural" properties. Lessig et al have only made use of a positive buzzword.
Its just another example of co-opting a word for its connotations, not its true meaning (like calling every act of violence or non-patriotic idea a "terrorist" threat).
If these science projects can help gather data on the true pros and cons of controversial ideas, then these projects are a good thing.
If these science projects can help inform the public about controversial ideas, then these projects are a good thing.
If these science projects can help train future voters to think rationally about controversial ideas, then these projects are a good thing.
I'm sure that some of the projects may be buzzword laden copies of wikipedia entries, but I applaud those ernest young researchers that tackle tough societally-relevant topics with good science.
I wonder if short copyright terms hurt other artists (i.e., not those whose copyright has lapsed) in indirect ways.
To me, the current world is drowning in media and choice. In many ways, media consumption is a zero-sum game. I can only listen for so many hours per day. Current iPods hold upwards of 1,000 hours of music -- you can listen for 8 hours a day and only hear the same song 3 times a year if you want. This massive supply of music makes each track less valuable.
Think of it this way. When my iPod has 15,000 songs, is the 15,001st song worth that much? For the most part that 15,001st song must be worth far less than $0.99 and maybe less than a penny. Sure, I may have a few hot favs that command a premium but, by and large, an iPod's worth of music provides all the fresh (or relatively fresh to me, that is) music that I could ever hope to listen to.
Short copyright terms help flood the market with large volumes of cheap music and current recording artists will find themselves competing against inexpensive copies of old, great songs.
As a consumer, I want music to be plentiful and cheap. In contrast, an artist wants music (including music created by others) to be rare and expensive.
The intricacies of spreadsheets make them much harder to edit in parallel. On a wikipedia entry it doesn't matter if one person edits something about the history of something while another person expands a section on the future. Aside from minor inconsistencies, which are easy to spot, the document is essentially the sum of its parts.
In contrast, the parts of a spreadsheet have strict dependencies that can span the spreadsheet and affect correctness in subtle ways. For example, if one person adds a row in one section, how should formulas in a different section react (do range references to the row above expand to encompass the new row or do range references to the row below expand or neither?). "Trace dependencies" functions can help but only if each editor recognizes that the scope of their edits is potentially unbounded.
The point is that it's harder to allow simultaneous independent edits because the internals of a spreasheet don't have independence.
The chip industry spends billions in R&D to extend the performance growth of silicon chips. A very large number of engineers know how to design efficient fabs for silicon. Until this technology also attracts a sufficient following of $ and manufacturing experience, I won't count silicon out.
Also, it's not clear that this technology isn't subject to same "limits of Moore's law" (if there is such a thing) as silicon chips. The use of electron-beam lithography would seem to mean that this technology is subject to the some of the same feature-size and practicality limits suffered by silicon chips.
Perhaps this technology will find a place somewhere, it just faces a major uphill battle if it is to supplant silicon.
If **AA prosecutes the original buyer of illegally distributed watermarked copies, then pirate distributors will create malware to steal originals from unsuspecting copy owners. Computer owners that don't secure their machines will find that someone has surreptitiously copied their media files, sold or traded them on the open market and made the owner of the infected machine liable for criminal act.
With only 49 steps of programming memory, 8 data registers, and a 4-level stack, the HP-25 was an gentle introduction to programming in the small. The total lack of non-volatile RAM or secondary storage plus the 3-4 hour battery life sucked, but the machine was still my pride and joy in 1977.
I don't know how many different versions of a prime number generator I wrote or how many times I keyed in the Moon Landing Simulator program.
The problem is all the variants of a given malware. For most users, the signature of the payload is less meaningful than the subject line of the e-mail. A virus email that promises Kama Sutra pictures is "different" from one promising Miss Lebanon even if the underlying payload and behavior is identical.
Perhaps AV experts need to use cladistics with a standardized set of feature dimensions. A cladogram of the virus varients and some threshold distance in feature-space would help segment similar and dissimilar malware.
I actually don't hold out much hope for this because malware is an adaptive threat. Malware creators might (and do) easily take steps to obfuscate their warez -- creating spurious variants for the express purpose of confusing AV software, news reporting, and users. The more variants that appear, the harder it is to counter the threat.