I have run into this myself. The problem is that teachers are trained in "education", and not in the academic disciplines they are supposed to be teaching. The SAT scores of incoming ed majors are near the bottom of the heap, and many graduating seniors have trouble passing their exit exams in basic knowledge (an outright majority failed exams in their specialities, the last I heard).
These "teachers" are just pedants. They are not as smart as many of their students, and they know it. The only thing they can do to "keep control" is to never admit they don't know something, and never admit they are wrong. In the process, they ruin whatever education goes on in their classrooms because the students know (or eventually learn) that what they are being taught is inaccurate or just plain false. It's truly sad that tenured teachers can barely be fired for misconduct, and probably not at all for incompetence. --
I didn't register. Someone did it for me. The login slashdoted/slashdot still works, for those who don't care to attach their name to things. (NYT still gets their ad-impression revenue if they don't get your name, so the privacy-invasion is just a cheesy bit of Little Brotherism.) --
Basically, anytime a programmer thought of a good idea, they could provide an open-source implementation to make sure that no one else could patent it.
You don't need to provide an implementation to get a patent, you just need to describe the concept which is "the invention". Besides, while you are busy trying to get an implementation working, someone else could file a patent on the concept and fence it off as private property.
The biggest problem I can see with software patents vs. open source is that open source has no revenue stream to use to finance a defensive patent portfolio. Though that leads to an interesting idea upon which others have speculated before: the Open-Source Patent Portfolio. Since one of the ways that companies (like IBM!) derive revenue is by licensing patents, the OSPP could patent inventions by open-source inventors (or have the patents sold to them), and license them out under a license which gives anyone the right to use the inventions in open-source software for no fee. Companies wishing to use any OSPP patents in closed-source products could do so for a fee and a cross-licensing agreement which allows all their patents to be used in open-source software for free under the OSPP license. This scheme might even generate enough revenue to kick some back to the inventors. --
Enough. For instance, in 1992 Northwest Airlines (a US carrier) became the largest user of Airbus aircraft in the world, when they took delivery of their 32nd A-320. And in 1997, NWA ordered another 50 Airbus aircraft.
Airbus Industrie would not exist if it weren't for European government subsidies. IMHO, the USA is pretty generous to allow Europe to finance competition for Boeing (and incidentally, put Lockheed out of the commercial aircraft business and force McDonnell-Douglas into a takeover) without claiming unfair trading practices and charging back the subsidies. --
I'm so damn tired of this "if you dont like it move somewhere else" attitude. What if you find something you really dont like with your country? Would you shut up and just move without a word? Or would you complain about it?
This is a dead-accurate rebuttal to the "leave it" crowd, and I wish I could claim credit for it:
My country, right or wrong. When right, to keep it right. When wrong, to make it right. --
That wouldn't work. All they would have to do is get an expert witness to "personally" perform the encryption or decryption, and then testify about the results under oath.
Besides, a license is a contract, and contract terms which are contrary to the public interest are unenforceable (in US courts, at least). License terms forbidding the use of the algorithm by law enforcement would certainly be held as contrary to the public interest, and if you tried bringing a case against a police agency for using your algorithm you'd probably be slapped with fines by the court for bringing a frivolous action (if you could get the case to court at all).
Don't forget, the system is rigged to support the interests of the people who've bought it and run it. You have to be more clever than that to trip the lumbering giant which is the establishment. --
I can understand why Symantec wouldn't want such a thing decrypted - a competitor could simply decrypt their list and use it.
No they couldn't. Ever wonder how mailing list companies stay in business, even though they can't encrypt their lists? They just seed their lists with bogus names and addresses; if someone's mailing hits a bunch of them, they know that someone was using their list (whether they paid for it or not). Symantec could easily salt their lists with a bunch of bogus URL's designed to fingerprint it, and they'd be able to roast list-thieves over a bed of coals even if it was in the clear. However, this wouldn't protect them from criticism. --
the net is a great cultural resource (if you are white, male and living in the west....
Exactly how is the net going to discriminate against you if you're not white or not male? Even living in the West doesn't seem to be a big issue, judging from the number of users I see coming from Bangalore and Mumbai.
Speaking English is an issue I suppose, but judging from the number of American-born people whom I can't understand without great effort, this isn't necessarily an advantage you get from living in the West. --
There are thousands of books that are copyright free
This is great, unless you happen to like a genre or style which didn't exist 75 years ago. And what about the new authors? Are we supposed to stop supporting them, just because of the corporate framework which dominates their distribution (for the moment)? What would we have to read today if those authors of 75 years ago had been ignored due to a copyright-law dispute, and nobody could make a living by writing?
some of the best music is in your back yard played by local bands
Again, this assumes you live in a place where there's enough of a market for the style of music you like to have bands that play it. It also assumes that you can get out for your music; what do you do at work, at home? To list just one troubling question, are sick people undeserving of decent music?
Any way you slice it, there isn't any alternative to fixing the DMCA and the rest of our broken system. --
The platform's flexible, modular architecture makes it easy to build optical cross connects (OXCs)
Seems that you can build router with these.
You didn't read the whole article, did you? The switching is done with vapor bubbles (presumably in a liquid medium). Forming and removing vapor bubbles takes tens or hundreds of microseconds. At a mere 2 Gb/sec, a 100-K packet goes by in 400 microseconds; its 128-byte IP header flashes past in half a microsecond. Plus, this thing can switch light beams but it has no way to recognize what it's switching (according to the article, "the platform is bit-rate and protocol transparent"); if it can't tell what a header is, it can't possibly route anything. --
An optical switch is one thing, but it doesn't do much that a technician swapping cables can't do (only slower). An optical router, now, that would be the biggest enabling technology for an all-optical network. It's also the most difficult. --
the switch will operate by producing bubbles, like in inkjet printers??
Yes. Many modern inkjet printers operate by flash-boiling a bit of the ink to create a vapor bubble which forces liquid ink out the orifice. Since there's a large discontinuity in refractive index between liquid and vapor, you can use this to reflect light. You use heating elements just like ink-jet print heads, and you can get switching rates comparable to ink-jet dot rates. (Mind your temperature limits, this thing isn't going to work very well above the critical temperature or below the freezing point of its working fluid! Sub-cooling will not gain you anything in the overclocking race.;-)
It strikes me as amusing that this switch is going to be "vapor"-ware even after it ships... --
Light is transmitted across a horizontal path from the input to output port until a switch command is issued. When commanded, a bubble is created at the intersection of the appropriate waveguides and the light is reflected down a vertical path to the switched port. This bubble is formed using the same reliable technology now used in inkjet printers.
Unless you want to compute at bubble-making speeds (tens of microseconds) instead of at transistor-switching speeds (picoseconds), you wouldn't want to try making an optical CPU with this technology. Oh, it almost certainly takes thousands of times the energy to create a bubble as it does to switch a gate, so you could have a power-hog of a slow processor too. Finally, the bubble creation is probably done thermally, so you have heating and cooling delays even if you don't do a conversion from light to electricity. --
Satellite BROADCASTERS (key word here) are sending you and me their signal right now.
Did they send you the DECRYPTION KEYS (key words here), or did you misappropriate them? This is the essential difference between an encrypted signal and one in the clear: use of the encrypted signal depends on having a secret key for access (which may be stolen), but use of a signal broadcast in the clear requires nothing beyond the receiver. AFAIK, there are NO laws restricting you from receiving encrypted satellite transmissions, only ones against decrypting them without legal access to the keys. Any satellite channel broadcasting in the clear (and there are many) can be watched by anyone, without legal repercussions.
Making it unlawful to receive clear-channel cellular phone transmissions is ludicrous. An analog phone broadcasts its EIN in the clear, which is why "cloning" attacks are so easy. This is only possible because the cellular companies decided it was cheaper to substitute the fake security of a legal "solution" for the true security of an encrypted data channel between the phones and the cells. How many billions in stolen service have they lost because of this? No doubt, more than enough by now to have paid for upgrading the protocol. --
At least there is some justification for the descrambling laws; if you are watching a broadcast that you have refused to pay the going rate for, you are stealing the service. The law making it illegal to receive clear-channel cellular transmissions is in an entirely different category, because it is not aimed at preventing theft of service, it is a fiction aimed at creating an illusory layer of protection for privacy. As any cryptanalyst will tell you, sometimes bad protection is worse than no protection. --
...one wonders if proposed legislation doesn't have to go through some sort of informal review for its legality before being brought to the floor of the house or senate.
You can stop wondering. There is no such review, as proven by the fact that the so-called Communications Decency Act became law despite its un-Constitutional provisions. --
... my code was almost always about only 1/4 of lines compared to the listing in the books.
Brevity may be the soul of wit, but it is also the heart of elegance. Unfortunately, too many of us have had to suffer with "teachers" who aren't as smart as we are, and cannot recognize elegance when they see it. However, any teacher who marked you down for turning in work that didn't match the book should have been called on it; programming isn't just typing in the text on a page, it is the creation of a system which meets its requirements. While some of the requirements may include format and documentation, anything that produces the correct output is performing correctly by definition. --
If you really want to mess with these bozos, and they demand information to go with your sale, do what I do: lie. Give them some bogus name and address, preferably one that is undeliverable (like a non-existent house number). If they try sending mail there, it either goes into a black hole or bounces back at a cost of probably $1 to analyze and delete from the database (requires a clerk's time). Salting their database with useless, costly errors makes it less worthwhile to maintain it, and thus less likely to dig deeper even if they aren't stopped by law. If they ask for your zip code, you could tell them you don't have one (yeah, right!), or fake it. I always give them 20215. If I bought enough stuff at those stores I'm sure I could make a few analysts scratch their heads. Oh, last and most important: always pay cash. --
The point of the crashing maneuver is to prevent Galileo from crashing into Europa and possibly contaminating it with Earth organisms, thereby making it difficult or impossible to determine if life arose there naturally. Galileo's mission is almost done, but the value of future missions is at stake here. We sterilized the Viking probes to avoid just this scenario. --
..why not a few good orbits around Jupiter to build up momentum?
I lack the time to go into detail about this, and Slashdot isn't the place to try to deliver a tutorial in orbital mechanics anyway (even if I was expert enough to teach such a thing, which I'm not). So the short answers are:
It doesn't work like that.
Momentum is conserved, it has to come from somewhere, and there's no available source other than the on-board rocket motors. "Winding up" won't boost anything any more than Earth will fling itself into interstellar space as a result of 4.3 billion circles around Sol.
The kind of celestial billiard shots which got Galileo to Jupiter in the first place (first Venus, then Earth, then Earth again; the so-called VEEGA) require massive bodies to apply the kicks (gravity is the mediating force). This also requires being in roughly the same orbital plane... I think. The moons of Jupiter are too small to apply big enough kicks, and Galileo is in a nearly-polar orbit which cannot take good advantage of them anyway.
So that's my take on the issue.
This sort of project (even if unsuccessful) would teach NASA how to use unfueled satellites efficiently.
NASA/JPL has been doing this since before you were born. Just getting Galileo to Jupiter without the Centaur booster originally specified for the purpose (NASA refused to allow hydrogen-fuelled rockets in the Shuttle cargo bay after Challenger) required wizardry and finesse beyond your dreams. See this link for more information on the VEEGA maneuver, and this for data on the Venus-Venus-Earth-Jupiter slingshot used to get Cassini to Saturn. --
Slashdot Mirror
These "teachers" are just pedants. They are not as smart as many of their students, and they know it. The only thing they can do to "keep control" is to never admit they don't know something, and never admit they are wrong. In the process, they ruin whatever education goes on in their classrooms because the students know (or eventually learn) that what they are being taught is inaccurate or just plain false. It's truly sad that tenured teachers can barely be fired for misconduct, and probably not at all for incompetence.
--
I didn't register. Someone did it for me. The login slashdoted/slashdot still works, for those who don't care to attach their name to things. (NYT still gets their ad-impression revenue if they don't get your name, so the privacy-invasion is just a cheesy bit of Little Brotherism.)
--
The biggest problem I can see with software patents vs. open source is that open source has no revenue stream to use to finance a defensive patent portfolio. Though that leads to an interesting idea upon which others have speculated before: the Open-Source Patent Portfolio. Since one of the ways that companies (like IBM!) derive revenue is by licensing patents, the OSPP could patent inventions by open-source inventors (or have the patents sold to them), and license them out under a license which gives anyone the right to use the inventions in open-source software for no fee. Companies wishing to use any OSPP patents in closed-source products could do so for a fee and a cross-licensing agreement which allows all their patents to be used in open-source software for free under the OSPP license. This scheme might even generate enough revenue to kick some back to the inventors.
--
Airbus Industrie would not exist if it weren't for European government subsidies. IMHO, the USA is pretty generous to allow Europe to finance competition for Boeing (and incidentally, put Lockheed out of the commercial aircraft business and force McDonnell-Douglas into a takeover) without claiming unfair trading practices and charging back the subsidies.
--
My country, right or wrong.
When right, to keep it right.
When wrong, to make it right.
--
Besides, a license is a contract, and contract terms which are contrary to the public interest are unenforceable (in US courts, at least). License terms forbidding the use of the algorithm by law enforcement would certainly be held as contrary to the public interest, and if you tried bringing a case against a police agency for using your algorithm you'd probably be slapped with fines by the court for bringing a frivolous action (if you could get the case to court at all).
Don't forget, the system is rigged to support the interests of the people who've bought it and run it. You have to be more clever than that to trip the lumbering giant which is the establishment.
--
--
It's really hard to laugh at a story like this when the geography is all wrong; someone from E. Laconia would just answer "Internet sucks". ;-)
--
Speaking English is an issue I suppose, but judging from the number of American-born people whom I can't understand without great effort, this isn't necessarily an advantage you get from living in the West.
--
Any way you slice it, there isn't any alternative to fixing the DMCA and the rest of our broken system.
--
--
An optical switch is one thing, but it doesn't do much that a technician swapping cables can't do (only slower). An optical router , now, that would be the biggest enabling technology for an all-optical network. It's also the most difficult.
--
It strikes me as amusing that this switch is going to be "vapor"-ware even after it ships...
--
--
Making it unlawful to receive clear-channel cellular phone transmissions is ludicrous. An analog phone broadcasts its EIN in the clear, which is why "cloning" attacks are so easy. This is only possible because the cellular companies decided it was cheaper to substitute the fake security of a legal "solution" for the true security of an encrypted data channel between the phones and the cells. How many billions in stolen service have they lost because of this? No doubt, more than enough by now to have paid for upgrading the protocol.
--
At least there is some justification for the descrambling laws; if you are watching a broadcast that you have refused to pay the going rate for, you are stealing the service. The law making it illegal to receive clear-channel cellular transmissions is in an entirely different category, because it is not aimed at preventing theft of service, it is a fiction aimed at creating an illusory layer of protection for privacy. As any cryptanalyst will tell you, sometimes bad protection is worse than no protection.
--
--
This is "insightful" at the least.
--
(thumbs nose at the moderator)
--
Yup. Looks like a paragraph tag and a tag got lost somewhere.
--
--
If you really want to mess with these bozos, and they demand information to go with your sale, do what I do: lie. Give them some bogus name and address, preferably one that is undeliverable (like a non-existent house number). If they try sending mail there, it either goes into a black hole or bounces back at a cost of probably $1 to analyze and delete from the database (requires a clerk's time). Salting their database with useless, costly errors makes it less worthwhile to maintain it, and thus less likely to dig deeper even if they aren't stopped by law. If they ask for your zip code, you could tell them you don't have one (yeah, right!), or fake it. I always give them 20215. If I bought enough stuff at those stores I'm sure I could make a few analysts scratch their heads. Oh, last and most important: always pay cash.
--
--
The point of the crashing maneuver is to prevent Galileo from crashing into Europa and possibly contaminating it with Earth organisms, thereby making it difficult or impossible to determine if life arose there naturally. Galileo's mission is almost done, but the value of future missions is at stake here. We sterilized the Viking probes to avoid just this scenario.
--
- It doesn't work like that.
- Momentum is conserved, it has to come from somewhere, and there's no available source other than the on-board rocket motors. "Winding up" won't boost anything any more than Earth will fling itself into interstellar space as a result of 4.3 billion circles around Sol.
- The kind of celestial billiard shots which got Galileo to Jupiter in the first place (first Venus, then Earth, then Earth again; the so-called VEEGA) require massive bodies to apply the kicks (gravity is the mediating force). This also requires being in roughly the same orbital plane... I think. The moons of Jupiter are too small to apply big enough kicks, and Galileo is in a nearly-polar orbit which cannot take good advantage of them anyway.
So that's my take on the issue. NASA/JPL has been doing this since before you were born. Just getting Galileo to Jupiter without the Centaur booster originally specified for the purpose (NASA refused to allow hydrogen-fuelled rockets in the Shuttle cargo bay after Challenger) required wizardry and finesse beyond your dreams. See this link for more information on the VEEGA maneuver, and this for data on the Venus-Venus-Earth-Jupiter slingshot used to get Cassini to Saturn.--