You're right, I always use "one-time pad" in the sense of "perfect random data". I don't regard algorithmically generated OTPs as actually being OTPs, they're just a symmetric key with an obscure key generation algorithm.
A real OTP is mathematically unbreakable, as it's impossible to tell which particular variant of "sense" data corresponds to the plaintext. The only way you can be sure is if you have a key that corresponds to a known (by you) key generation algorithm, in which case you are not dealing with an OTP as I understand it.
To confirm this, I was able to find two suppliers of encryption software for SMS in the UK.
http://kryptext.com/faq.html This downloadable product (£6.99 per phone) can't be very secure, as the manual has no key exchange protocol in it. I suspect that it uses hashed data to derive keys (or has a fixed key), probably phone numbers. It's very cheap, and certainly sufficient to hide data from your spouse, but a determined assault on their algorithm will probably open it up like a book.
http://www.emosecure.com/ This one is SIM dependant, and while users can exchange keys, it looks like they are symmetric (all users in a group share the same password), which means you only have to compromise one key to read all messages, and key exchange is a weak link.
Alas, I don't read enough Italian to discover what kind of protocol the Caspertech solution uses, so perhaps someone can have a look and enlighten us.
If the carrier is just that, a carrier of data, it doesn't matter what the carrier does, you can establish an encrypted link without it's involvement beyond moving the data.
Making the carrier the sole means of key exchange would be the only way to give them access (they could perpetrate a man-in-the-middle attack). But if you are able to meet physically with your call partner, or exchange keys through an alternate secure medium, the intermediary would have no cheap means of intercepting.
Only one-time pads are unbreakable, and using one-time pads makes key exchange *much* less secure. But public key methods are enough to make it very hard to break a single transmission. Programs like ECHELON would be utterly stuffed.
And of course, if you have a mobile data plan with more than a few kBit/s of bandwidth, this is entirely possible now, as demonstrated by these Italian chappies.
Blooming heck though - $410 for their SMS encryption package and $2,200 for the voice version. I'm willing to bet that even with patent licensing, the per unit cost is very small. I could probably write Windows Mobile software to do encrypted SMS in a day or so, and I'm no encryption whiz.
I don't see this as a story about the comparative benefits of the Chinese vs UK education system ; what I see it is is a story about the absurdity of league tables in the context of public services.
It's all part of the giant lie that The Market Will Save Us All.. maybe a perfect market would, but you're never going to achieve one.
Instead of improving the education of children, the metrics used to rank the schools are leading to the system being gamed, at the cost of the education of the children. The same occurs in the health service, everywhere in public services that this ridiculous concept is applied.
And of course, they will also take molecules known to work already, whether from old drugs moving out of patent, or from herbals, and tweak the molecules subtly.
Hey presto! Redo the trials, print some glossy pamphlets about decreased morbidity, and you have a brand new patent medicine ready to milk some more money from the punters...
For a long while, I couldn't drink gin and tonic anymore, because even the non-diet tonics had replaced half their cane sugar content with saccharine, possibly the worst-tasting sweetener ever.
Happily, the tide seems to be turning - Tesco (the UK's Wal-Mart), has introduced a "Premium" brand that has no artificial sweetener. Alas, double the sugar, double the calories, but my mouth doesn't feel "blah" anymore after drinking a G&T. The "Premium" version of the diet tonic uses a more modern sweetener than saccharine (I can't recall, maybe sucralose).
What really gets my goat is that you can legally label a product "Contains no artificial flavours", even if it contains artificial sweetener. I mean, what happened to "sweet" being one of the six basic flavours?
I might be a snob, but while I used to like Dairy Milk as a child, these days I think it's horrible.
The quality of chocolate varies enormously. I've tried Hershey chocolate, it reminds me of the description of the Nutri-Matic tea from the Hitch Hikers Guide - almost, but not quite, entirely unlike chocolate. I can fully understand why Americans taste Dairy Milk and rave about how good it is, if this is what they have for comparison.
Dairy Milk is many times better than Hershey but I now find it to be excessively sweet and greasy.
The bare minimum standard for me has become Green & Blacks milk. G&B milk contains 37% cocoa solids, whereas Dairy Milk is 22%. I tend to prefer darker chocolate now. The G&B dark with sour cherries can make my eyelids flutter, it's that good.
A small bag of fresh chocolates from the local chocolatier (shipped from Belgium) was a weekly treat until my wife developed a conscience about child slavery on cocoa plantations. They beat out any boxed chocolate that I'd tasted before. I'm spoiled for the mass-manufactured brands now, I can really taste the difference in flavour, which I attribute to nasty synthetic ingredients and preservatives.
The absolute best chocolate I've ever had was sourced from a chocolatier in Purbeck, UK. Never mind that they claim to be ethically sound, their chocolates are inspiringly good. Alas, the price is a little prohibitive - I think I shall be restricting my custom to less than once every two months.
My wife can still enjoy Dairy Milk, even if she does appreciate the finer stuff, but I shall never buy it again.
I don't believe that ED-209 was polite enough to say 'Please'.
You can imagine C-3PO doing it though. 'If it's not too much trouble, I wonder if you could you set your weapon down. No? Don't mind me, I'm sorry to have disturbed you.' 'And you said it wa "nice" here.'
Well, yes, but they can only make charges that get paid to the company they hacked, not to their own merchant account.
Because of the way that public key crypto works, you can be assured of the sender of a particular piece of information. If you have someone's private key, you can pretend to be that entity, sure. But the CC company would associate that key and content signed with it with that merchant account only, and would instantly detect requests to pay into another account. In fact, it would be unnecessary to quote an account number - the CC company would keep a DB of which account number goes with which key.
You could use it to discredit a company by racking up huge unauthorized charges against it's name, but unless you also have a means of transferring that money away from the company account, you can't use this method for personal financial gain.
Well, I'm using Vista, and I have to say, there are various things about it I don't like.
F'rinstance, I just shelled out for a pair of 3D shutter glasses. Now, my graphics card has no drivers for it yet, and I don't blame MS for that, because it's NVidias fault. But it looks like the fancy Aero interface will prevent them from working in a windowed application, which may rule out their use for things like CAD and molecular modelling, which I had an interest in.
My joystick drivers are utterly fubar.
Getting a microphone to work for VOIP games has been a nightmare.
Mind, some of these things will change. The driver model in Vista has changed dramatically, and top that with a graphics card with a brand new driver architecture of its own, and you're bound to have some problems.
So a lot of the problems are teething trouble. But there are still things that will by the looks of it continue to irk and annoy and restrict me. Here's hoping that the productivity applications I want to use get ported to Linux.
I nearly bought XP, for the record, having been on Win2k until it prevented me from running an application. But I thought, why buy an OS that's going out, when there's a new one coming in.....
I'll second the sibling poster - ActiveX plugins are the most enormous security hole ever.
I mean, you can mark them "Safe for Scripting" just by flipping a bit. There's a tool in the SDK to do it. Doesn't make it so, and IE can't verify that they are safe because it's compiled code.
They don't run in a sandbox. They are raw, native code, running in your browser process. They are allowed to access files. Hell, they can poke around in your BIOS - Dell has one that identifies your system service tag. Most of the exploits that used to involve hanging up your modem silently and dialling a premium rate number to replace your connection were mediated through ActiveX controls.
It sounds quite a cool idea though, it makes for a rich browser experience, it just wasn't done with any thought of the potential security implications.
The Borg could go two ways - you could have the Star Trek portrayal, ruled by a central intelligence that compels it to extend, embrace and extinguish, or you could have a happier Borg - a collective of individuals who collaborate on the machinery that supports their life, in order that they can spend the majority of their time having a great time in a virtual theme park of a life.
I mean, give me full body cybernetic implants including systems that can generate all the nutrients my body requires from nothing but the energy inputs required to reprocess waste products? Hell yes, I'd spend most of my time doing whatever the hell I liked, either in the "real world" or in a virtual utopia that could either be my own private universe or a MMO game on steroids (but without the levelling grind).
I'd like to think that a Borg society arising from a more liberal culture, like the Swedish, would be more like that. I always saw the Borg as characterising global capitalism in Star Trek, although I'm not sure that was the official intent.
Because the royalties don't just go to the composer, they also go to the performers. There will be copyright on the recording of the performance, and the holder of that copyright will profit from royalties.
Given the enormous expense of producing classical music verses popular music, that's not so bad. The vast majority of the expenses associated with popular music are tied up in promotion. Full orchestral pieces need a huge soundstage, require you to pay a large number of highly trained people, need extensive rehearsal beforehand, etc. A record by Ms Spears just requires her to squawk into a mic in a quiet room for a bit and the geek with the autotuner to put in an all-nighter. I have no arguments with paying the relatively modest premiums for a superior product.
I find this ruling a shame though. The comments by the industry body that they are excited to be enabling the internet radio industry are such bullshit. They are secretly peeing their pants with glee that they managed to kill off a source of virtually free, high quality digital music, because without it, listeners will obviously be more inclined to spend some money.
I'm glad this discussion surfaced, because it helped me find what I thought was an extinct model - I have one of these and I dread the day it dies because I'd hate to have to go back to horrible fluppitty rubber keyboards.
The Das is intrinsically a Cherry keyboard - it's pretty much what they used to sell as a Cherry "Click". I have one of these which I bought some time ago as a result of my personal policy not to skimp on user interface devices (mouse, keyboard, monitor, all of these are very important and should outlast any system you use).
My other keyboard is a '98 vintage Model M made in Scotland. I'm not quite sure which I prefer - both have proper mechanical mechanisms. The M lacks a windows key, which I actually found annoying until I bound some ctrl-alt hotcuts to VBScripts that replace the windows key combos I use. The M is somewhat heavier and noisier, the Cherry is quieter (but still not as quiet as a fluppitty rubber keyboard). The Cherry is at work because it's more considerate than the IBM in an open-plan cubeless office.
I hope the legendary longevity of this type of keyboard holds for me, because Cherry don't seem to make them anymore. They make the keyswitches. They list two keyboard models - one explicitly uses "rubber mat", the other is "affordable" and carefully refrains from mentioning which technology it uses.
Which is absurd - all the stockists I checked have zero stock. It's also the ONLY keyboard to have any feedback in one web shop - 5 stars and two rave reviews. May a million insects infest the underpants of the short sighted accountants who decreed that all modern systems come bundled with a keyboard technology that was rightly regarded with scorn and derision on systems like the Spectrum 128. Who knows how many instances of RSI and carpal tunnel syndrome they are responsible for.
The only ways I now know of to get a proper keyboard are the Das, get a vintage M, or go for a Unicomp Customizer.
*does a little more searching*
I tell a lie - Cherry still list these keyboards, but only on their German website. You want a Cherry G80-3000, and I could find several stockists for it.
I don't know what would replace all that fiber and the corporations that own it.
How about we keep the fiber, and nationalize the corporations running it? Issue an internet license to all users, much like the British television license. Since the TV license covers the cost of huge amounts of content production as well as the distribution network, an internet license at the same $200 per head it costs would be ample to cover network running and development costs, and probably seem rather reasonable compared to present telco bills.
Of course, the USA couldn't possibly conceive of an entity that could provide a decent service because it wasn't shoving handfuls of cash into its CEOs pockets instead of investing it in infrastructure.
You can't really apply the whole "if you're stupid enough to gamble.." argument there.
Yes you can. Gambling is just a scam anyway - sure, it's a scam that certain people find entertaining. But the maths is always on the side of the house.
Yes, there are certain games that can be won with a degree of skill. But the vast majority of casino gamblers do not have that skill, and if they do exhibit it, the house will refuse to play with them.
Does the entertainment value of gambling represent a fair payback for your losses? Well, that's up to the individual to decide. The problem I see is that most of the thrill of gambling stems from a misunderstanding of statistics - the gamer has an inflated perception of his chances of winning, which the casino does everything to reinforce. If people truly understood the statistics, they'd either all be very good (and the casino would fold), or they wouldn't game in the first place.
Are you thrilled to pay your taxes? No, because you perceive it as giving your money away. The reality is that you are far more likely to get something of value back for the money though.
And that is precisely what they are doing by cancelling the accounts of their delinquent customers. You can't have it both ways - you can either have a great roaming network service with unlimited surfing and personal communication, with restrictions in place that prevent you from spoiling it from everyone else. Or you can have nothing, because a poor service won't attract subscribers and thus won't be viable.
On the flip side, the attitude that the Tragedy of the Commons is not your problem is one of the prevailing cultural attitudes of Western capitalism that I would be pleased to see the back of. TotC is, by definition, the problem of everyone using a common resource.
The choice that government has made to license use of the radio spectrum to private companies is a way to manage those commons, but it's distinctly non-optimal, because the corporations expect to make a handsome profit on their investments, which means that the costs to the true owners of the resource (the public) is much higher than it would be if we all just lived up to our responsibilities and managed it properly, or in this case, possibly even higher than if we just ruined it and lived without wireless network access, which is after all something of a luxury item.
So many people on this thread are talking about downloading movies, calculating what the average bandwidth of college students is, etc....
What they are not addressing is that most people would be using wired bandwidth for these tasks. Wired bandwidth is relatively plentiful, even with the bottlenecks in the local loop. The capacity in the backbones is mostly restricted by the amount of routing, not the capacity of the fibers, which isn't anywhere near full (hear about all that "dark fiber"? New multiplexers? Hmm?)
On the other hand, if you use wireless bandwidth, you're consuming it from a relatively small pool allocated to a cell. There's only so much you can squeeze out of radio bandwidth, which is why it's such a big deal to the cellular networks when the government auction off another slice of spectrum.
Yes, this is false advertising by Verizon. But the real issue is a minority of idiots spoiling the party for everyone else ; you just can't support those usage patterns over current wireless technologies, not for everyone in the cell. They are quite reasonably ticked off with a minority of the customers degrading their service and making them look bad to the rest.
If you want industrial quantities of bandwidth, you should be using a landline, and paying for it.
In an ideal world, marketing would make it very clear what service you were getting, and people would be more respectful of limited common resources, like radio spectrum.
One of the byproducts of algal oil farming is large quantities of high-protein, highly nutritious husk. If the extraction process is less than 100% efficient, it will also contain lots of nice omega fatty acids. This would make a great cattle feed, would be essentially a bonus product (since you really want the oil), and the cows would be a lot healthier both from their point of view, and in terms of the benefits of their flesh to human health. Most meat animals are not really physiologically suited to eating a lot of corn, it effects the pH balance of their intestines allowing the growth of pathogenic organisms ; this is one of the reasons they get pumped full of antibiotics.
Imagine how much more efficient it would be to have the people eating it though - as long as you could make it taste and feel good in the mouth, you'd save about 90% of the energy which is ordinarily wasted in the meat production process.
Not true. Western nations are declining ; the only reason for any population growth in many of them is the influx of immigrants from poorer nations. The statistic of 2.4 children is just not accurate any more. Most of us have rapidly ageing populations (in that the proportion of old people to young people is rising). This will lead to a situation where it will no longer be the children and grandchildren of oldies supporting them in their twilight years, but the state and possibly young immigrants. Either that, or we'll all be left to rot, because neither of those groups actually cares about a bunch of fat, senile, unproductive, whiteys. Our own kids probably don't care either.
It would seem that the way to limit world population is to give everyone a huge colour TV. This induces the cultural and societal malaise of the West that causes poor marital relations, consumerism as a driving force in your life instead of family, and the attendant variables like breeding rate drop tremendously.
Not that I advocate unrestricted breeding. I support a reduced human population on this planet - it's the only way we are going to be sustainable, barring developments in technology. But I forsee problems occurring because of the shrinking youth population in western nations. It's shrinking too fast.
I actually meant "moving from C/C++ to C#", not the other way around. Sorry I wasn't more explicit, I thought it was implied by my pointing out that C# was simpler than these.
I fully understand that C/C++ are a totally different kettle of fish which is why I've so far avoided them like the plague. I do occasionally patch some one-liners in things like MythTV, or add a few lines to an array in the kernel, but as for writing something from scratch, the last time I even thought about it was when I owned an Amiga - I was instantly put off by the thick, expensive, heavy books one had to own to even use the windowing system, being an impoverished schoolboy (at a time when the internet was just a wet dream and BBS was king). I had to ride my bike 15 miles to an industrial estate just to get to a PD duplicator for a C compiler!
And I agree - O-O is not the be all and end all, and for small applications it can get in the way of a quick implementation (which is often all that's needed). I find myself frustrated with C# and Java sometimes because their procedural side is less developed than something like VB6, in which I can rattle a small, solid, production quality application out in less than an afternoon.
I've never had to develop device drivers or super-performance-dependant code, and IMHO, that's the last remaining space where the malloc() dependant languages (and assembler) are still necessary. You obviously always need them, because without languages that manage memory explicitly, what do you write the memory managers for virtual machines in?:-)
The prospect of managing my own memory? Yuck. Managing JetDB database handles in VB3 code is horrible enough, without having to use malloc() as well. I'm quite happy to stand on the shoulders of the giants who write the VM so that I can get on with solving the problems that my boss poses instead of the problems that the architecture throws at me. Peace?
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You're right, I always use "one-time pad" in the sense of "perfect random data". I don't regard algorithmically generated OTPs as actually being OTPs, they're just a symmetric key with an obscure key generation algorithm.
A real OTP is mathematically unbreakable, as it's impossible to tell which particular variant of "sense" data corresponds to the plaintext. The only way you can be sure is if you have a key that corresponds to a known (by you) key generation algorithm, in which case you are not dealing with an OTP as I understand it.
To confirm this, I was able to find two suppliers of encryption software for SMS in the UK.
http://kryptext.com/faq.html
This downloadable product (£6.99 per phone) can't be very secure, as the manual has no key exchange protocol in it. I suspect that it uses hashed data to derive keys (or has a fixed key), probably phone numbers. It's very cheap, and certainly sufficient to hide data from your spouse, but a determined assault on their algorithm will probably open it up like a book.
http://www.emosecure.com/
This one is SIM dependant, and while users can exchange keys, it looks like they are symmetric (all users in a group share the same password), which means you only have to compromise one key to read all messages, and key exchange is a weak link.
Alas, I don't read enough Italian to discover what kind of protocol the Caspertech solution uses, so perhaps someone can have a look and enlighten us.
If the carrier is just that, a carrier of data, it doesn't matter what the carrier does, you can establish an encrypted link without it's involvement beyond moving the data.
Making the carrier the sole means of key exchange would be the only way to give them access (they could perpetrate a man-in-the-middle attack). But if you are able to meet physically with your call partner, or exchange keys through an alternate secure medium, the intermediary would have no cheap means of intercepting.
Only one-time pads are unbreakable, and using one-time pads makes key exchange *much* less secure. But public key methods are enough to make it very hard to break a single transmission. Programs like ECHELON would be utterly stuffed.
And of course, if you have a mobile data plan with more than a few kBit/s of bandwidth, this is entirely possible now, as demonstrated by these Italian chappies.
Blooming heck though - $410 for their SMS encryption package and $2,200 for the voice version. I'm willing to bet that even with patent licensing, the per unit cost is very small. I could probably write Windows Mobile software to do encrypted SMS in a day or so, and I'm no encryption whiz.
I don't see this as a story about the comparative benefits of the Chinese vs UK education system ; what I see it is is a story about the absurdity of league tables in the context of public services.
It's all part of the giant lie that The Market Will Save Us All.. maybe a perfect market would, but you're never going to achieve one.
Instead of improving the education of children, the metrics used to rank the schools are leading to the system being gamed, at the cost of the education of the children. The same occurs in the health service, everywhere in public services that this ridiculous concept is applied.
It's actually so they can change the ingredients to anything that begins with "C"
My wife and I now habitually call KFC, "Kentucky Fried Cat"
And of course, they will also take molecules known to work already, whether from old drugs moving out of patent, or from herbals, and tweak the molecules subtly.
Hey presto! Redo the trials, print some glossy pamphlets about decreased morbidity, and you have a brand new patent medicine ready to milk some more money from the punters...
Yup, even in the "non-diet" tonic water.
For a long while, I couldn't drink gin and tonic anymore, because even the non-diet tonics had replaced half their cane sugar content with saccharine, possibly the worst-tasting sweetener ever.
Happily, the tide seems to be turning - Tesco (the UK's Wal-Mart), has introduced a "Premium" brand that has no artificial sweetener. Alas, double the sugar, double the calories, but my mouth doesn't feel "blah" anymore after drinking a G&T. The "Premium" version of the diet tonic uses a more modern sweetener than saccharine (I can't recall, maybe sucralose).
What really gets my goat is that you can legally label a product "Contains no artificial flavours", even if it contains artificial sweetener. I mean, what happened to "sweet" being one of the six basic flavours?
a dairy milk bar is fine
I might be a snob, but while I used to like Dairy Milk as a child, these days I think it's horrible.
The quality of chocolate varies enormously. I've tried Hershey chocolate, it reminds me of the description of the Nutri-Matic tea from the Hitch Hikers Guide - almost, but not quite, entirely unlike chocolate. I can fully understand why Americans taste Dairy Milk and rave about how good it is, if this is what they have for comparison.
Dairy Milk is many times better than Hershey but I now find it to be excessively sweet and greasy.
The bare minimum standard for me has become Green & Blacks milk. G&B milk contains 37% cocoa solids, whereas Dairy Milk is 22%. I tend to prefer darker chocolate now. The G&B dark with sour cherries can make my eyelids flutter, it's that good.
A small bag of fresh chocolates from the local chocolatier (shipped from Belgium) was a weekly treat until my wife developed a conscience about child slavery on cocoa plantations. They beat out any boxed chocolate that I'd tasted before. I'm spoiled for the mass-manufactured brands now, I can really taste the difference in flavour, which I attribute to nasty synthetic ingredients and preservatives.
The absolute best chocolate I've ever had was sourced from a chocolatier in Purbeck, UK. Never mind that they claim to be ethically sound, their chocolates are inspiringly good. Alas, the price is a little prohibitive - I think I shall be restricting my custom to less than once every two months.
My wife can still enjoy Dairy Milk, even if she does appreciate the finer stuff, but I shall never buy it again.
I don't believe that ED-209 was polite enough to say 'Please'.
You can imagine C-3PO doing it though. 'If it's not too much trouble, I wonder if you could you set your weapon down. No? Don't mind me, I'm sorry to have disturbed you.' 'And you said it wa "nice" here.'
Well, yes, but they can only make charges that get paid to the company they hacked, not to their own merchant account.
Because of the way that public key crypto works, you can be assured of the sender of a particular piece of information. If you have someone's private key, you can pretend to be that entity, sure. But the CC company would associate that key and content signed with it with that merchant account only, and would instantly detect requests to pay into another account. In fact, it would be unnecessary to quote an account number - the CC company would keep a DB of which account number goes with which key.
You could use it to discredit a company by racking up huge unauthorized charges against it's name, but unless you also have a means of transferring that money away from the company account, you can't use this method for personal financial gain.
Alas, there are certain things that no longer work on Win2k. Supreme Commander, for instance.
That's what got me off it, and onto Vista. I may have gone for XP if I'd had my present experience then.
Well, I'm using Vista, and I have to say, there are various things about it I don't like.
F'rinstance, I just shelled out for a pair of 3D shutter glasses. Now, my graphics card has no drivers for it yet, and I don't blame MS for that, because it's NVidias fault. But it looks like the fancy Aero interface will prevent them from working in a windowed application, which may rule out their use for things like CAD and molecular modelling, which I had an interest in.
My joystick drivers are utterly fubar.
Getting a microphone to work for VOIP games has been a nightmare.
Mind, some of these things will change. The driver model in Vista has changed dramatically, and top that with a graphics card with a brand new driver architecture of its own, and you're bound to have some problems.
So a lot of the problems are teething trouble. But there are still things that will by the looks of it continue to irk and annoy and restrict me. Here's hoping that the productivity applications I want to use get ported to Linux.
I nearly bought XP, for the record, having been on Win2k until it prevented me from running an application. But I thought, why buy an OS that's going out, when there's a new one coming in.....
I'll second the sibling poster - ActiveX plugins are the most enormous security hole ever.
I mean, you can mark them "Safe for Scripting" just by flipping a bit. There's a tool in the SDK to do it. Doesn't make it so, and IE can't verify that they are safe because it's compiled code.
They don't run in a sandbox. They are raw, native code, running in your browser process. They are allowed to access files. Hell, they can poke around in your BIOS - Dell has one that identifies your system service tag. Most of the exploits that used to involve hanging up your modem silently and dialling a premium rate number to replace your connection were mediated through ActiveX controls.
It sounds quite a cool idea though, it makes for a rich browser experience, it just wasn't done with any thought of the potential security implications.
The Borg could go two ways - you could have the Star Trek portrayal, ruled by a central intelligence that compels it to extend, embrace and extinguish, or you could have a happier Borg - a collective of individuals who collaborate on the machinery that supports their life, in order that they can spend the majority of their time having a great time in a virtual theme park of a life.
I mean, give me full body cybernetic implants including systems that can generate all the nutrients my body requires from nothing but the energy inputs required to reprocess waste products? Hell yes, I'd spend most of my time doing whatever the hell I liked, either in the "real world" or in a virtual utopia that could either be my own private universe or a MMO game on steroids (but without the levelling grind).
I'd like to think that a Borg society arising from a more liberal culture, like the Swedish, would be more like that. I always saw the Borg as characterising global capitalism in Star Trek, although I'm not sure that was the official intent.
Because the royalties don't just go to the composer, they also go to the performers. There will be copyright on the recording of the performance, and the holder of that copyright will profit from royalties.
Given the enormous expense of producing classical music verses popular music, that's not so bad. The vast majority of the expenses associated with popular music are tied up in promotion. Full orchestral pieces need a huge soundstage, require you to pay a large number of highly trained people, need extensive rehearsal beforehand, etc. A record by Ms Spears just requires her to squawk into a mic in a quiet room for a bit and the geek with the autotuner to put in an all-nighter. I have no arguments with paying the relatively modest premiums for a superior product.
I find this ruling a shame though. The comments by the industry body that they are excited to be enabling the internet radio industry are such bullshit. They are secretly peeing their pants with glee that they managed to kill off a source of virtually free, high quality digital music, because without it, listeners will obviously be more inclined to spend some money.
Nope, it's a Cherry G80-3000
I'm glad this discussion surfaced, because it helped me find what I thought was an extinct model - I have one of these and I dread the day it dies because I'd hate to have to go back to horrible fluppitty rubber keyboards.
The Das is intrinsically a Cherry keyboard - it's pretty much what they used to sell as a Cherry "Click". I have one of these which I bought some time ago as a result of my personal policy not to skimp on user interface devices (mouse, keyboard, monitor, all of these are very important and should outlast any system you use).
My other keyboard is a '98 vintage Model M made in Scotland. I'm not quite sure which I prefer - both have proper mechanical mechanisms. The M lacks a windows key, which I actually found annoying until I bound some ctrl-alt hotcuts to VBScripts that replace the windows key combos I use. The M is somewhat heavier and noisier, the Cherry is quieter (but still not as quiet as a fluppitty rubber keyboard). The Cherry is at work because it's more considerate than the IBM in an open-plan cubeless office.
I hope the legendary longevity of this type of keyboard holds for me, because Cherry don't seem to make them anymore. They make the keyswitches. They list two keyboard models - one explicitly uses "rubber mat", the other is "affordable" and carefully refrains from mentioning which technology it uses.
Which is absurd - all the stockists I checked have zero stock. It's also the ONLY keyboard to have any feedback in one web shop - 5 stars and two rave reviews. May a million insects infest the underpants of the short sighted accountants who decreed that all modern systems come bundled with a keyboard technology that was rightly regarded with scorn and derision on systems like the Spectrum 128. Who knows how many instances of RSI and carpal tunnel syndrome they are responsible for.
The only ways I now know of to get a proper keyboard are the Das, get a vintage M, or go for a Unicomp Customizer.
*does a little more searching*
I tell a lie - Cherry still list these keyboards, but only on their German website. You want a Cherry G80-3000, and I could find several stockists for it.
I don't know what would replace all that fiber and the corporations that own it.
How about we keep the fiber, and nationalize the corporations running it? Issue an internet license to all users, much like the British television license. Since the TV license covers the cost of huge amounts of content production as well as the distribution network, an internet license at the same $200 per head it costs would be ample to cover network running and development costs, and probably seem rather reasonable compared to present telco bills.
Of course, the USA couldn't possibly conceive of an entity that could provide a decent service because it wasn't shoving handfuls of cash into its CEOs pockets instead of investing it in infrastructure.
You can't really apply the whole "if you're stupid enough to gamble.." argument there.
Yes you can. Gambling is just a scam anyway - sure, it's a scam that certain people find entertaining. But the maths is always on the side of the house.
Yes, there are certain games that can be won with a degree of skill. But the vast majority of casino gamblers do not have that skill, and if they do exhibit it, the house will refuse to play with them.
Does the entertainment value of gambling represent a fair payback for your losses? Well, that's up to the individual to decide. The problem I see is that most of the thrill of gambling stems from a misunderstanding of statistics - the gamer has an inflated perception of his chances of winning, which the casino does everything to reinforce. If people truly understood the statistics, they'd either all be very good (and the casino would fold), or they wouldn't game in the first place.
Are you thrilled to pay your taxes? No, because you perceive it as giving your money away. The reality is that you are far more likely to get something of value back for the money though.
And that is precisely what they are doing by cancelling the accounts of their delinquent customers. You can't have it both ways - you can either have a great roaming network service with unlimited surfing and personal communication, with restrictions in place that prevent you from spoiling it from everyone else. Or you can have nothing, because a poor service won't attract subscribers and thus won't be viable.
On the flip side, the attitude that the Tragedy of the Commons is not your problem is one of the prevailing cultural attitudes of Western capitalism that I would be pleased to see the back of. TotC is, by definition, the problem of everyone using a common resource.
The choice that government has made to license use of the radio spectrum to private companies is a way to manage those commons, but it's distinctly non-optimal, because the corporations expect to make a handsome profit on their investments, which means that the costs to the true owners of the resource (the public) is much higher than it would be if we all just lived up to our responsibilities and managed it properly, or in this case, possibly even higher than if we just ruined it and lived without wireless network access, which is after all something of a luxury item.
So many people on this thread are talking about downloading movies, calculating what the average bandwidth of college students is, etc....
What they are not addressing is that most people would be using wired bandwidth for these tasks. Wired bandwidth is relatively plentiful, even with the bottlenecks in the local loop. The capacity in the backbones is mostly restricted by the amount of routing, not the capacity of the fibers, which isn't anywhere near full (hear about all that "dark fiber"? New multiplexers? Hmm?)
On the other hand, if you use wireless bandwidth, you're consuming it from a relatively small pool allocated to a cell. There's only so much you can squeeze out of radio bandwidth, which is why it's such a big deal to the cellular networks when the government auction off another slice of spectrum.
Yes, this is false advertising by Verizon. But the real issue is a minority of idiots spoiling the party for everyone else ; you just can't support those usage patterns over current wireless technologies, not for everyone in the cell. They are quite reasonably ticked off with a minority of the customers degrading their service and making them look bad to the rest.
If you want industrial quantities of bandwidth, you should be using a landline, and paying for it.
In an ideal world, marketing would make it very clear what service you were getting, and people would be more respectful of limited common resources, like radio spectrum.
One of the byproducts of algal oil farming is large quantities of high-protein, highly nutritious husk. If the extraction process is less than 100% efficient, it will also contain lots of nice omega fatty acids. This would make a great cattle feed, would be essentially a bonus product (since you really want the oil), and the cows would be a lot healthier both from their point of view, and in terms of the benefits of their flesh to human health. Most meat animals are not really physiologically suited to eating a lot of corn, it effects the pH balance of their intestines allowing the growth of pathogenic organisms ; this is one of the reasons they get pumped full of antibiotics.
Imagine how much more efficient it would be to have the people eating it though - as long as you could make it taste and feel good in the mouth, you'd save about 90% of the energy which is ordinarily wasted in the meat production process.
Not true. Western nations are declining ; the only reason for any population growth in many of them is the influx of immigrants from poorer nations. The statistic of 2.4 children is just not accurate any more. Most of us have rapidly ageing populations (in that the proportion of old people to young people is rising). This will lead to a situation where it will no longer be the children and grandchildren of oldies supporting them in their twilight years, but the state and possibly young immigrants. Either that, or we'll all be left to rot, because neither of those groups actually cares about a bunch of fat, senile, unproductive, whiteys. Our own kids probably don't care either.
It would seem that the way to limit world population is to give everyone a huge colour TV. This induces the cultural and societal malaise of the West that causes poor marital relations, consumerism as a driving force in your life instead of family, and the attendant variables like breeding rate drop tremendously.
Not that I advocate unrestricted breeding. I support a reduced human population on this planet - it's the only way we are going to be sustainable, barring developments in technology. But I forsee problems occurring because of the shrinking youth population in western nations. It's shrinking too fast.
I actually meant "moving from C/C++ to C#", not the other way around. Sorry I wasn't more explicit, I thought it was implied by my pointing out that C# was simpler than these.
:-)
I fully understand that C/C++ are a totally different kettle of fish which is why I've so far avoided them like the plague. I do occasionally patch some one-liners in things like MythTV, or add a few lines to an array in the kernel, but as for writing something from scratch, the last time I even thought about it was when I owned an Amiga - I was instantly put off by the thick, expensive, heavy books one had to own to even use the windowing system, being an impoverished schoolboy (at a time when the internet was just a wet dream and BBS was king). I had to ride my bike 15 miles to an industrial estate just to get to a PD duplicator for a C compiler!
And I agree - O-O is not the be all and end all, and for small applications it can get in the way of a quick implementation (which is often all that's needed). I find myself frustrated with C# and Java sometimes because their procedural side is less developed than something like VB6, in which I can rattle a small, solid, production quality application out in less than an afternoon.
I've never had to develop device drivers or super-performance-dependant code, and IMHO, that's the last remaining space where the malloc() dependant languages (and assembler) are still necessary. You obviously always need them, because without languages that manage memory explicitly, what do you write the memory managers for virtual machines in?
The prospect of managing my own memory? Yuck. Managing JetDB database handles in VB3 code is horrible enough, without having to use malloc() as well. I'm quite happy to stand on the shoulders of the giants who write the VM so that I can get on with solving the problems that my boss poses instead of the problems that the architecture throws at me. Peace?
Fortunately, the one query that Clippy always responded to correctly was
"How do I kill the f**king paperclip?"