ROFL! Yeah, unfortunatly my friends in the Great White North say you'll soon be facing your own version of the Abomination that is the DMCA. But we can hope Parliment has more sense.
Indeed they have (made hardware standards) which may be part of the reason we had "emulate three buttons" for our mice, and now have more buttons, wheels, force feedback, and lord knows what else, than we can use. Let's not forget the useless extra "standard" keys. Well, useless until we re-map them to something else.
I'll resist the "Elitist" urge to NOT make computers even easier to use than they are (SPAM exists because lemmings use computers) and side with the mass consumers here who want their machines even simpler to use. You know - the same crowd who's VCR still blinks 12:00 on the face. Perhaps MS and the hardware manufacturers are onto something here. I mean, how long did it take them to emulate MacOS? Why not emulate the iMac itself? And we all know how Customer Focused Microsoft is. Why there couldn't possibly be an ulterior motive here could there?
Like, say, set hardware standards that lock you into the OS/Hardware combination? Licensing fees that make you 'rent' your OS? "PC Phone home!" and make sure you have your credit card ready, otherwise your OS will shut down rendering your fancy new integrated PC a doorstop.
"I'll just load BSD on it!" Well, sure, if the BIOS will let you.
"I"ll just hack the BIOS so I can load Linux!" Well,sure, except for the teeny problem of those pesky Reverse Engineering and Circumvention clauses in the DMCA.
WILL this all turn out that way? Who knows. But given past performance, I don't see how this can be beneficial to the COnsumer without being a lot MORE beneficial to Microsoft.
Why is the PC market in a slump? Ask Microsoft. You know: the people who encourage you to upgrade to a 3GHz CPU with 2 Gig of RAM so your spreadsheets will run "So much faster!" (Ok, not fair maybe. That's just for the business desktops. We all know the power's there to play the latest and greatest video games)
It may be that the PS2 is already a mature product and adding capability (that may or may not compete with Sony's other products - eg Vaio series computers) won't hurt their bottom line. MicroSoft does seem to me more aggressive about keeping control of their platform to what THEY want it to be, whereas Sony seems to be a bit more mellow about letting the consumer use the hardware for their own purposes.
Personally, I think I'd just run an S-Video out from my video card to my TV if I wanted to do this (I already feed MP3's into the Stereo) - but it is still a cool piece of software.
And perhaps Ford has no incentive to invest billions of dollars in safety research unless the govt can grant them a monopoly on making cars. - NO, I don't buy it. Sorry, but the world is full of lunatics and governments who have no incentive to do big public goods unless they have the power to impose their crazy schemes on society to ensure it's worth it. Fine, if they believe in it that strongly than form a co-op and make it work for themselves within. If I have AIDS, I assure you, the thought that someone else could copy my cure would not de-motivate me from funding it.
You're losing me here. There was actually very little research into vehicle safety until the government started mandating vehicles become safer. Ford's incentive to do research above and beyond that is to get a competitive advantage with people who believe safe cars are important. That's why Volvo was ahead of the safety curve. And Ford, like other auto manufacturers DOES patent safety devices and then licenses the patents to others so they can share the technology.
Airbag technology was patented, but the patents have long since expired. I'm not following the Lunatics thread here. Basic economics says it's not worth developing a product of ANY form if there's no payout in the end. Altruism is nice, but it really doesn't pay the bills. I'm NOT defending greed here, but I AM pointing out that someone has to pay for the R&D, and if there's no profit from the R&D, no one will spend the money.
The problem isn't a system that needs a few tiny adjustments here and there, the problem is a fundamental failure to understand the nature of patents, monopoly, innovation, and freedom. The patent system is broken because patents are broken - it is the most obvious and rational explanation.
You're oversimplifying the issue. It's neither obvious or rational that "The patent system is broken because patents are broken." The implementation of the patent concept may be broken, but the concept is still valid. While there are reasons to change things, the fact remains that there needs to be some form of incentive to innovate. "Because it's cool!" is certainly valid for a hobbiest or garage inventor, but no one is going to spend hundreds of millions on inventions unless they're either independantly wealthy to a stupidly large degree, or they think there's a reasonable chance of recovering their investment.
The biotech industry is the worst example as demonstrated by it's close cousin the pharmacutical industry - who litterally went to the papers and said that they had no incentive to develop a cure for AIDS unless they could effectively have the power to lock out millions of Africans dying from AIDS. IMHO, quite a price to maintain an artificial government granted monopoly. Even worse, is how the patent system has made it nearly impossible for research firms to cooperate and collaberate on finding a cure.
Never said it was easy. The problem is there is no incentive for the companies to do the raw research to develop the anti-(insert disease here) drug if they'll never get a return on the investment. There's a lot of tangled interests, including the lawyers who like to sue drug companies for drugs they've already put through testing, and the FDA who wants to protect the public.
They don't want the power to lock out millions of Africans. They want to get some sort of return on the multi-Billion dollar investment they'd have wrapped up in a cure.
The patent system is broken, obviously. But it still has a purpose.
Patents are, unfortunatly, not a cut and dried issue. As many have noted, there are companies who make a business model of "Get patent: Sue competitors: Profit" which is plainly an abuse of the intent. (Much as the current fiasco of copyright law is painfully UNLIKE the original intent, but I digress.)
The original intent was to give an inventor time to get some return on their investment in an invention to help promote development. After some set period of time the patent would expire and others could benefit from the invention and manufacture it. Note: invention. They were implying some form of device. Not business model or one-click-shopping.
Now, the patent system still has some benefits. The biotech industry is a good example, where the development costs are staggering and the times to market are long and arduous. It can take years to get a new drug approved, and by then the patent may nearly have expired.
I'm glad the EU countries have a differnt take on it. Unfortunately, the US government is becoming notorious for not caring about what the rest of the world thinks. The "best method" is probably somewhere in the middle, but we'll never see it in the US as long as the business that bought the government still get their way.
While point 1 is accurate, point 2 is almost irrelevant to the process. The system described is being used at a Turkey processing plant where the cost of transport is considerably less than trucking the byproducts to an off-site rendering facility. Ultimately, this is a form of recycling where the energy expended to "make the product" was put in for some purpose other than use as fuel. EG. Turkey's for dinner.
The recent Discover had an extensive article on the process and the fact that it works on nearly any -organic- waste. They've used it on everything from turkey byproducts and medical waste (which is rendered sterile) to raw sewage. The proportion of chemicals in the output (oils, etc) depends on what goes in on the feed end. They burn the gasses on-site to help power the system. As I read it, they were producing a barrel of oil for something like $12 - $15 a barrel.
I'm not sure if the full article is on-line for Discover, but this looks like a solid process. (The "breakthrough" was flashing off the water and recovering the heat)
Actually, no, it's not meaningless to release it in Binary with no source. Yes, Open Sourcing the game would be cool, but it's a commercial product and they have reasons for keeping a reign on the client software. There are known compatibility issues between clients and servers of different revs. Open source would make that issue alone a nightmare. Never mind the potential for cheating.
Nope. Sorry. While there's a coolness factor in playing with the source, it won't make the game better for the majority of players.
Actually, the SETI project doesn't expect to receive signals from "enormous" (on a galactic scale, anyway) range. The signals they expect to receive are more or less the equilivant to I Love Lucy re-runs broadcast from our stellar neighborhood. The chances of the originator being extinct would be fairly low.
The assumption (admitedly debatable) is that radio transmission is a technology that an advanced culture will at some point probably stumble on to, and thus we may be able to hear thier transmissions. Further, since the strength of the signals will be incredibly faint, the chance of hearing a signal from especially far away is remote. As I remember it, they were figuring on a range of something like 30 - 100 light years max given the estimated signal strength and the sensitivity of the receiver.
The definition of INTELLIGENCE is not the question, but the definition of "Signal of Intelligent origin." There are quite a few papers on the subject if you're interested.
Finally, the "Waste of resources" is more or less irrelevant. The SETI receiver was piggy-backed on the Aricebo dish and got it's data more or less free of charge. At least compared to other projects. The analysis was done by volunteers around the world. They chose to contribute. While I've heard people say Distributed.Net is a better project, I heartily disagree. Those challenges are all exploring a finite mathamatical space. There IS a solution.
With SETI, there -may- be a solution - and if there is, it will be the most profound discovery in Human history.
Ah, very true. But even then what you can do would be limited by the inability to save your work. Remember, we were talking just a bootable DVD here and no additional hardware - not even the memory cards. Without any way to save, it would probably be rather frustrating to lose everything each time you had to shut down the console.
As in understand it the "Linux kit" includes the hard drive and ethernet card. Even if you could boot it to Linux without a drive and NIC, it would be more or less useless - except for the coolness factor of seeing an X desktop of some form on your TV.
Considering what you want, me thinks you'll be sleeping for quite some time.
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A close friend of mine owned one of these abominations - it used to drop into V4 mode and refuse to come out until the motor had shut down and cooled off. As I commented earlier, I find it strange to see them praising the revival of a 20 year old technology.
Why not? Because it doesn't put out more power per litre than any other normally aspirated production mill, and compared to Honda's bike engines it's not especially impressive. In fact, bike motors have been getting better than 120HP/L for years.
Horsepower is all about getting fuel and air through the motor. You can go big bore (8L Viper), pressure charged (Subaru WRX, Mercedes SLK), or spin it like crazy (Honda S2000, nearly any Bike motor), to get the same effect.
I was surprised to see them calling GM's V8/4 truck motor innovative. Have they forgotten the old Cadillac V8/6/4 motor? On second thought, they probably have. That motor was a disaster...
someday I'll discover that some IP fscked company has patented guava-tree leafs as a medicine for stomachache and that is an inovative use, but that is as fact known in Brazil since the days of my grand-grand mother (and before that, probably) and nobody patented it (how do you patent common-sense or folklore?).
That would fall under the heading of Prior Art - at least as long as someone had documentation that proved grandma was using it 80 years ago or whatever. Hopefully, any patent application would fail during application, or collapse when they tried to enforce it.
This DMCA thing is just plain stupid. Skylink here is patently NOT circumventing the security to access the copywritten part of the device (the rolling code). They are, as others have mentioned, using an undocumented API call, or Reboot guest:guest, or any of a number of other metaphores, to get the hardware to activate. That's not covered by the DMCA. Unless, of course, they want to count coming in through the side door and pusing the Manual Release button as circumvention too.
Ah well. I'd have hoped that stupidity like this would lead to changes in the law, we we've already seen how readily politicians respond to media manipulation.
Strange as it seems, I remember reading about a WWII German Aiti-Aircraft weapon that was strangely similar to this. Supposedly, it could generate vortecies powerful enough to make an aircraft uncontrollable in flight and in some cases break up. As I remember, it never had the range they wanted (tens, rather than thousands, of meters) and was never deployed operationally.
Looks like another 50-year-old technology has found a use doing something it wasn't originally designed for.
Amen. The ultimate responsibility for the kids lies with the parent. It's not up to anyone to censor the Net for them. However, as several people aptly point out, the.kids.us gives a "Known safe" space to work within.
Of course, we're left with the spectre of "Who's policing.kids.us for us?" but it's a step in the right direction. We're left with "assumed safe" sites rather than "Unknown blocks" from censorware
And many EULA's have been found unenforcable. Remember, this is hardware not software. My WRX didn't come with an EULA from Subaru saying I could only run Amoco Premium in the tank and couldn't change the air cleaner for a K&N, why shoud an X-Box come with an EULA that restricts what I do with MY hardware.
You BUY hardware, you don't license it.
Now, I agree with you completely that snagging another MAC and S/N at random is very uncool for the poor sot who actually buys the iron with those numbers.
As for why it's OK to break the licensing agreement, I point out (again) that hardware is NOT licensed, it's owned. I do not RENT my console. I own it.
As for circumventing the ban, given the above (I own my iron) I figure it's within my rights as a user to USE the iron I bought and paid for.
I'm NOT condoning cheating or anything with a mod. This isn't about cheating. It's about the owner's rights to use their own gear.
Interesting reasoning, and certainly valid. I just wonder what "professional" representation the Open Source community will have on this panel.
I don't see anything wrong with Microsoft telling their side of the story. But the Open Source community doesn't really have that "single front PR department" that MS has. How will the panel hear both sides, if only one side is speaking?
Good point (as was the other response to this). I'm obviously not a patent attorney, but still have a less than sterling opinion of the current patent process. My point here is that there is a lot of effort required to patent an idea. There are patent searches, etc., to name just the most obvious. Putting the effort into patenting the new algorythm if you're not absolutely sure it's going to stand up to analysis is almost certainly not worth the expenditure.
If you're an experienced cryptologist, chances are you already know the chances your algorythm has of withstanding attack and analysis. But then you'd also have a good idea whether it was worth patenting - or the company you're working for will make the decision on whether or not to patent it.
And yes, RSA is a highly successful algorythm - created by three of the finest cryptologists in the business. It was patent protected, but had a reasonable license model for application development. If it hadn't, and hadn't been created by folks with a known track record, it wouldn't have gotten anywhere near as far.
I don't mean to put the original poster down at all here (being an amature (very amature) cryptologist myself) but if he's asking/. for our collective opinion, I seriously doubt he has the credentials required.
Looks like you've hit this one on the head. Crypto is a very conservative world and people don't adopt new algorythms untill they've been analyzed to death. Being unwilling to publish it makes me suspecious right from the start. Once it's published he'll at least have copyright protection and can worry about the patent later.
We won't go into professional cryptologists opinions of amatures with "new and revolutionary ideas." (But some of the threads in the USENET crypto groups can be very enlightening on that count)
To answer his specific question, I would say NO. Unless he plans to use some form of free license, there are far too many good, unencumbered, crypto systems out there already for it to be worth it to add yet another patented one. At least for implementations at the application level. If there's going to be money in it, it'll be made from a good implementation of the system.
Yes, we can at times convince companies to use it. I work for "a small hardware manufacturer in the Valley" that has/had a licensing arrangement for the commercial PGP application - that cost a fair amount of money per seat. Many of our Engineers adopted GnuPG for thier Solaris and Linux boxen and use it daily. I (and several of my co-workers) use it in our department, and we actively promote it's use throughout the company.
It can work quite well, especially when you get a couple of tech-savy executives clued into the concept of using digital signatures on their documents.
. . . the reactions to this here. I've always seen 'l33t' speak as something akin to "Ebonics" - a form that's quite valid in it's own context, but that doesn't have a place in school in general, and English class in particular. Netspeak is, at best, a dialect. One that takes an exclusively written form, and is normaly reserved to certain compatible media.
That teachers are taking a stand and slapping kids down for getting lazy (or stupid!) is a good sign. That most of the comments on/. I've read are supportive of the teachers is an even better sign.
Imagine:/. as a bastion against the creeping death of the English language. Scary, is it not?
To me, this means that accepting credit card payments is not just a privilege of those who can "qualify" at a bank, but available to anyone with just a painless web signup. And the fees are less too.
One of the issues that has been brought up is that PayPal is NOT more economical than a merchant account. You reference their site, and I honestly wish I could find a good merchant account link - but I know from friends in business that the transaction fees are less than 2.9%.
While the point of qualification may be valid (there is none for a paypal account) the "savings" are non-existant for most business users. And, to be quite honest, it's not that difficult to qualify for a merchant account. A friend of mine started her business on-line with a merchant account and no real credit after a bankruptcy.
The real issue is that PayPal is NOT a bank, does not have the oversite that a bank does, and makes it so they can screw their users if they feel like it. The Judge in this instance has stepped in and told them "No, sorry, you aren't going to keep screwing your users."
Actually, more of a clue than you realize. And yes, I have.
I live with an IT manager for a large University Hospital and am painfully aware of the arguments and budget constraints. I am regularly shocked by some of the decisions made at the upper management levels regarding IT in general, and Information Security (my field) in particular. Yes their budgets are tight, but a little thought could save them a whole lot of money and make their lives easier overall.
Please note that I was responding to someone else who presented it as 'IT morons' wanting to change everything because it was the cool, geek, thing to do. Those aren't valid reasons to change an entire system.
I didn't say it was easy or cheap. But given the choice between paying for an upgrade to XP (assuming XP's licensing doesn't, itself, present unacceptable terms in the EULA) or migrating to Linux/BSD/Anything the arguments are valid. Obviously, some of those legacy systems are still in place because it costs too bloody much to replace them!
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ROFL! Yeah, unfortunatly my friends in the Great White North say you'll soon be facing your own version of the Abomination that is the DMCA. But we can hope Parliment has more sense.
Indeed they have (made hardware standards) which may be part of the reason we had "emulate three buttons" for our mice, and now have more buttons, wheels, force feedback, and lord knows what else, than we can use. Let's not forget the useless extra "standard" keys. Well, useless until we re-map them to something else.
I'll resist the "Elitist" urge to NOT make computers even easier to use than they are (SPAM exists because lemmings use computers) and side with the mass consumers here who want their machines even simpler to use. You know - the same crowd who's VCR still blinks 12:00 on the face. Perhaps MS and the hardware manufacturers are onto something here. I mean, how long did it take them to emulate MacOS? Why not emulate the iMac itself? And we all know how Customer Focused Microsoft is. Why there couldn't possibly be an ulterior motive here could there?
Like, say, set hardware standards that lock you into the OS/Hardware combination? Licensing fees that make you 'rent' your OS? "PC Phone home!" and make sure you have your credit card ready, otherwise your OS will shut down rendering your fancy new integrated PC a doorstop.
"I'll just load BSD on it!" Well, sure, if the BIOS will let you.
"I"ll just hack the BIOS so I can load Linux!" Well,sure, except for the teeny problem of those pesky Reverse Engineering and Circumvention clauses in the DMCA.
WILL this all turn out that way? Who knows. But given past performance, I don't see how this can be beneficial to the COnsumer without being a lot MORE beneficial to Microsoft.
Why is the PC market in a slump? Ask Microsoft. You know: the people who encourage you to upgrade to a 3GHz CPU with 2 Gig of RAM so your spreadsheets will run "So much faster!" (Ok, not fair maybe. That's just for the business desktops. We all know the power's there to play the latest and greatest video games)
It may be that the PS2 is already a mature product and adding capability (that may or may not compete with Sony's other products - eg Vaio series computers) won't hurt their bottom line. MicroSoft does seem to me more aggressive about keeping control of their platform to what THEY want it to be, whereas Sony seems to be a bit more mellow about letting the consumer use the hardware for their own purposes.
Personally, I think I'd just run an S-Video out from my video card to my TV if I wanted to do this (I already feed MP3's into the Stereo) - but it is still a cool piece of software.
"My name is 'root.' But you can call me 'God'."
Unfortunately, that's *NIX specific. But from a (l)user perspective, we can drop the 'root' part and just have them call us God.
There has to be SOME reward to the job after all!
And perhaps Ford has no incentive to invest billions of dollars in safety research unless the govt can grant them a monopoly on making cars. - NO, I don't buy it. Sorry, but the world is full of lunatics and governments who have no incentive to do big public goods unless they have the power to impose their crazy schemes on society to ensure it's worth it. Fine, if they believe in it that strongly than form a co-op and make it work for themselves within. If I have AIDS, I assure you, the thought that someone else could copy my cure would not de-motivate me from funding it.
You're losing me here. There was actually very little research into vehicle safety until the government started mandating vehicles become safer. Ford's incentive to do research above and beyond that is to get a competitive advantage with people who believe safe cars are important. That's why Volvo was ahead of the safety curve. And Ford, like other auto manufacturers DOES patent safety devices and then licenses the patents to others so they can share the technology.
Airbag technology was patented, but the patents have long since expired. I'm not following the Lunatics thread here. Basic economics says it's not worth developing a product of ANY form if there's no payout in the end. Altruism is nice, but it really doesn't pay the bills. I'm NOT defending greed here, but I AM pointing out that someone has to pay for the R&D, and if there's no profit from the R&D, no one will spend the money.
The problem isn't a system that needs a few tiny adjustments here and there, the problem is a fundamental failure to understand the nature of patents, monopoly, innovation, and freedom. The patent system is broken because patents are broken - it is the most obvious and rational explanation.
You're oversimplifying the issue. It's neither obvious or rational that "The patent system is broken because patents are broken." The implementation of the patent concept may be broken, but the concept is still valid. While there are reasons to change things, the fact remains that there needs to be some form of incentive to innovate. "Because it's cool!" is certainly valid for a hobbiest or garage inventor, but no one is going to spend hundreds of millions on inventions unless they're either independantly wealthy to a stupidly large degree, or they think there's a reasonable chance of recovering their investment.
The biotech industry is the worst example as demonstrated by it's close cousin the pharmacutical industry - who litterally went to the papers and said that they had no incentive to develop a cure for AIDS unless they could effectively have the power to lock out millions of Africans dying from AIDS. IMHO, quite a price to maintain an artificial government granted monopoly. Even worse, is how the patent system has made it nearly impossible for research firms to cooperate and collaberate on finding a cure.
Never said it was easy. The problem is there is no incentive for the companies to do the raw research to develop the anti-(insert disease here) drug if they'll never get a return on the investment. There's a lot of tangled interests, including the lawyers who like to sue drug companies for drugs they've already put through testing, and the FDA who wants to protect the public.
They don't want the power to lock out millions of Africans. They want to get some sort of return on the multi-Billion dollar investment they'd have wrapped up in a cure.
The patent system is broken, obviously. But it still has a purpose.
Patents are, unfortunatly, not a cut and dried issue. As many have noted, there are companies who make a business model of "Get patent: Sue competitors: Profit" which is plainly an abuse of the intent. (Much as the current fiasco of copyright law is painfully UNLIKE the original intent, but I digress.)
The original intent was to give an inventor time to get some return on their investment in an invention to help promote development. After some set period of time the patent would expire and others could benefit from the invention and manufacture it. Note: invention. They were implying some form of device. Not business model or one-click-shopping.
Now, the patent system still has some benefits. The biotech industry is a good example, where the development costs are staggering and the times to market are long and arduous. It can take years to get a new drug approved, and by then the patent may nearly have expired.
I'm glad the EU countries have a differnt take on it. Unfortunately, the US government is becoming notorious for not caring about what the rest of the world thinks. The "best method" is probably somewhere in the middle, but we'll never see it in the US as long as the business that bought the government still get their way.
While point 1 is accurate, point 2 is almost irrelevant to the process. The system described is being used at a Turkey processing plant where the cost of transport is considerably less than trucking the byproducts to an off-site rendering facility. Ultimately, this is a form of recycling where the energy expended to "make the product" was put in for some purpose other than use as fuel. EG. Turkey's for dinner.
The recent Discover had an extensive article on the process and the fact that it works on nearly any -organic- waste. They've used it on everything from turkey byproducts and medical waste (which is rendered sterile) to raw sewage. The proportion of chemicals in the output (oils, etc) depends on what goes in on the feed end. They burn the gasses on-site to help power the system. As I read it, they were producing a barrel of oil for something like $12 - $15 a barrel.
I'm not sure if the full article is on-line for Discover, but this looks like a solid process. (The "breakthrough" was flashing off the water and recovering the heat)
Actually, no, it's not meaningless to release it in Binary with no source. Yes, Open Sourcing the game would be cool, but it's a commercial product and they have reasons for keeping a reign on the client software. There are known compatibility issues between clients and servers of different revs. Open source would make that issue alone a nightmare. Never mind the potential for cheating.
Nope. Sorry. While there's a coolness factor in playing with the source, it won't make the game better for the majority of players.
Actually, the SETI project doesn't expect to receive signals from "enormous" (on a galactic scale, anyway) range. The signals they expect to receive are more or less the equilivant to I Love Lucy re-runs broadcast from our stellar neighborhood. The chances of the originator being extinct would be fairly low.
The assumption (admitedly debatable) is that radio transmission is a technology that an advanced culture will at some point probably stumble on to, and thus we may be able to hear thier transmissions. Further, since the strength of the signals will be incredibly faint, the chance of hearing a signal from especially far away is remote. As I remember it, they were figuring on a range of something like 30 - 100 light years max given the estimated signal strength and the sensitivity of the receiver.
The definition of INTELLIGENCE is not the question, but the definition of "Signal of Intelligent origin." There are quite a few papers on the subject if you're interested.
Finally, the "Waste of resources" is more or less irrelevant. The SETI receiver was piggy-backed on the Aricebo dish and got it's data more or less free of charge. At least compared to other projects. The analysis was done by volunteers around the world. They chose to contribute. While I've heard people say Distributed.Net is a better project, I heartily disagree. Those challenges are all exploring a finite mathamatical space. There IS a solution.
With SETI, there -may- be a solution - and if there is, it will be the most profound discovery in Human history.
Ah, very true. But even then what you can do would be limited by the inability to save your work. Remember, we were talking just a bootable DVD here and no additional hardware - not even the memory cards. Without any way to save, it would probably be rather frustrating to lose everything each time you had to shut down the console.
As in understand it the "Linux kit" includes the hard drive and ethernet card. Even if you could boot it to Linux without a drive and NIC, it would be more or less useless - except for the coolness factor of seeing an X desktop of some form on your TV.
Considering what you want, me thinks you'll be sleeping for quite some time.
A close friend of mine owned one of these abominations - it used to drop into V4 mode and refuse to come out until the motor had shut down and cooled off. As I commented earlier, I find it strange to see them praising the revival of a 20 year old technology.
At least they didn't include BMW's iDrive...
Why not? Because it doesn't put out more power per litre than any other normally aspirated production mill, and compared to Honda's bike engines it's not especially impressive. In fact, bike motors have been getting better than 120HP/L for years.
Horsepower is all about getting fuel and air through the motor. You can go big bore (8L Viper), pressure charged (Subaru WRX, Mercedes SLK), or spin it like crazy (Honda S2000, nearly any Bike motor), to get the same effect.
I was surprised to see them calling GM's V8/4 truck motor innovative. Have they forgotten the old Cadillac V8/6/4 motor? On second thought, they probably have. That motor was a disaster...
someday I'll discover that some IP fscked company has patented guava-tree leafs as a medicine for stomachache and that is an inovative use, but that is as fact known in Brazil since the days of my grand-grand mother (and before that, probably) and nobody patented it (how do you patent common-sense or folklore?).
That would fall under the heading of Prior Art - at least as long as someone had documentation that proved grandma was using it 80 years ago or whatever. Hopefully, any patent application would fail during application, or collapse when they tried to enforce it.
This DMCA thing is just plain stupid. Skylink here is patently NOT circumventing the security to access the copywritten part of the device (the rolling code). They are, as others have mentioned, using an undocumented API call, or Reboot guest:guest, or any of a number of other metaphores, to get the hardware to activate. That's not covered by the DMCA. Unless, of course, they want to count coming in through the side door and pusing the Manual Release button as circumvention too.
Ah well. I'd have hoped that stupidity like this would lead to changes in the law, we we've already seen how readily politicians respond to media manipulation.
Strange as it seems, I remember reading about a WWII German Aiti-Aircraft weapon that was strangely similar to this. Supposedly, it could generate vortecies powerful enough to make an aircraft uncontrollable in flight and in some cases break up. As I remember, it never had the range they wanted (tens, rather than thousands, of meters) and was never deployed operationally.
Looks like another 50-year-old technology has found a use doing something it wasn't originally designed for.
Amen. The ultimate responsibility for the kids lies with the parent. It's not up to anyone to censor the Net for them. However, as several people aptly point out, the .kids.us gives a "Known safe" space to work within.
.kids.us for us?" but it's a step in the right direction. We're left with "assumed safe" sites rather than "Unknown blocks" from censorware
Of course, we're left with the spectre of "Who's policing
And many EULA's have been found unenforcable. Remember, this is hardware not software. My WRX didn't come with an EULA from Subaru saying I could only run Amoco Premium in the tank and couldn't change the air cleaner for a K&N, why shoud an X-Box come with an EULA that restricts what I do with MY hardware.
You BUY hardware, you don't license it.
Now, I agree with you completely that snagging another MAC and S/N at random is very uncool for the poor sot who actually buys the iron with those numbers.
As for why it's OK to break the licensing agreement, I point out (again) that hardware is NOT licensed, it's owned. I do not RENT my console. I own it.
As for circumventing the ban, given the above (I own my iron) I figure it's within my rights as a user to USE the iron I bought and paid for.
I'm NOT condoning cheating or anything with a mod. This isn't about cheating. It's about the owner's rights to use their own gear.
Interesting reasoning, and certainly valid. I just wonder what "professional" representation the Open Source community will have on this panel.
I don't see anything wrong with Microsoft telling their side of the story. But the Open Source community doesn't really have that "single front PR department" that MS has. How will the panel hear both sides, if only one side is speaking?
Good point (as was the other response to this). I'm obviously not a patent attorney, but still have a less than sterling opinion of the current patent process. My point here is that there is a lot of effort required to patent an idea. There are patent searches, etc., to name just the most obvious. Putting the effort into patenting the new algorythm if you're not absolutely sure it's going to stand up to analysis is almost certainly not worth the expenditure.
/. for our collective opinion, I seriously doubt he has the credentials required.
If you're an experienced cryptologist, chances are you already know the chances your algorythm has of withstanding attack and analysis. But then you'd also have a good idea whether it was worth patenting - or the company you're working for will make the decision on whether or not to patent it.
And yes, RSA is a highly successful algorythm - created by three of the finest cryptologists in the business. It was patent protected, but had a reasonable license model for application development. If it hadn't, and hadn't been created by folks with a known track record, it wouldn't have gotten anywhere near as far.
I don't mean to put the original poster down at all here (being an amature (very amature) cryptologist myself) but if he's asking
Looks like you've hit this one on the head. Crypto is a very conservative world and people don't adopt new algorythms untill they've been analyzed to death. Being unwilling to publish it makes me suspecious right from the start. Once it's published he'll at least have copyright protection and can worry about the patent later.
We won't go into professional cryptologists opinions of amatures with "new and revolutionary ideas." (But some of the threads in the USENET crypto groups can be very enlightening on that count)
To answer his specific question, I would say NO. Unless he plans to use some form of free license, there are far too many good, unencumbered, crypto systems out there already for it to be worth it to add yet another patented one. At least for implementations at the application level. If there's going to be money in it, it'll be made from a good implementation of the system.
Yes, we can at times convince companies to use it. I work for "a small hardware manufacturer in the Valley" that has/had a licensing arrangement for the commercial PGP application - that cost a fair amount of money per seat. Many of our Engineers adopted GnuPG for thier Solaris and Linux boxen and use it daily. I (and several of my co-workers) use it in our department, and we actively promote it's use throughout the company.
It can work quite well, especially when you get a couple of tech-savy executives clued into the concept of using digital signatures on their documents.
. . . the reactions to this here. I've always seen 'l33t' speak as something akin to "Ebonics" - a form that's quite valid in it's own context, but that doesn't have a place in school in general, and English class in particular. Netspeak is, at best, a dialect. One that takes an exclusively written form, and is normaly reserved to certain compatible media.
/. I've read are supportive of the teachers is an even better sign.
/. as a bastion against the creeping death of the English language. Scary, is it not?
That teachers are taking a stand and slapping kids down for getting lazy (or stupid!) is a good sign. That most of the comments on
Imagine:
To me, this means that accepting credit card payments is not just a privilege of those who can "qualify" at a bank, but available to anyone with just a painless web signup. And the fees are less too.
One of the issues that has been brought up is that PayPal is NOT more economical than a merchant account. You reference their site, and I honestly wish I could find a good merchant account link - but I know from friends in business that the transaction fees are less than 2.9%.
While the point of qualification may be valid (there is none for a paypal account) the "savings" are non-existant for most business users. And, to be quite honest, it's not that difficult to qualify for a merchant account. A friend of mine started her business on-line with a merchant account and no real credit after a bankruptcy.
The real issue is that PayPal is NOT a bank, does not have the oversite that a bank does, and makes it so they can screw their users if they feel like it. The Judge in this instance has stepped in and told them "No, sorry, you aren't going to keep screwing your users."
Good for the Judge.
Actually, more of a clue than you realize. And yes, I have.
I live with an IT manager for a large University Hospital and am painfully aware of the arguments and budget constraints. I am regularly shocked by some of the decisions made at the upper management levels regarding IT in general, and Information Security (my field) in particular. Yes their budgets are tight, but a little thought could save them a whole lot of money and make their lives easier overall.
Please note that I was responding to someone else who presented it as 'IT morons' wanting to change everything because it was the cool, geek, thing to do. Those aren't valid reasons to change an entire system.
I didn't say it was easy or cheap. But given the choice between paying for an upgrade to XP (assuming XP's licensing doesn't, itself, present unacceptable terms in the EULA) or migrating to Linux/BSD/Anything the arguments are valid. Obviously, some of those legacy systems are still in place because it costs too bloody much to replace them!