The photos on his website are amazing. However, nearly every photo is a long exposure shot. What a let down. You can make any crazy picture you want with a long exposure shot. These pictures are not real. If you were actually standing there you wouldn't see it.
To his credit, he explains exactly how every shot was made and what the exposure settings were. He's not trying to trick anybody. But, it seems like most people are willing to trick themselves.
Also, you would call him a "da Vinci or our time"? Please mods, don't mod stuff like that up.
I've found that the prime95 stress test will catch errors that memtest won't. You need to run prime95 twice. Once right after booting the system, and a second time after the system has been running for more than a week (and in use for that week). Each run should be at least 1 hour.
I'm shocked no one has mentioned this yet. I want a depth/distance value. There's a lot of very interesting research that can be applied to pictures with an attached distance map.
My next desire is position/orientation of the camera body. Again, this is needed to enable some very interesting 3D reconstruction stuff.
This is horrible. How does crap like this get modded up? A "hot" game in 1989 would be something like Tetris. What's the price of Tetris today? About 5 bucks. The entire thesis of the post (that games have become too expensive over time) is wrong.
If you enjoy playing simple games like Asteroids, Pitfall and King's Quest then this is a good time to be alive. You can play games essentially identical to these top hits of yesteryear for free on the web. But, if you enjoy playing far more complicated games like Half-Life, Company of Heroes, and Fallout 3 then you should be thankful that there are people out there willing to pay $60 to encourage the software and hardware R&TD work that is required to make those games possible.
Lastly, why are you even upset? You rant about about how games are too expensive, but then tell a nice story about how you were able to buy 12 quality titles for cheap on Steam. So, you were able to get what you want at a price that you found acceptable. It sounds to me like the pricing structure of games is quite healthy. The people that want to pay more (you refer to them as idiots), can pay more. The people that want to pay less (you), can pay less. Everybody wins. What's the problem?
The PC computing model is commercially dead. Microsoft is trying to transition to the game console business model. We sell you a Microsoft machine. You can buy Microsoft approved first and third party titles. We make sure everything works. You can turn your brain off.
The classic PC model (my computer, keep your hands off) will live on thanks to the power of open source but it will not sustain commercial products.
Geez, you guys make this sound way more complicated than it really is. The Judicial branch of the US government does not exist to mindlessly enforce the laws that Congress pass. Their job is to act as a check and balance on Congress.
Where is the public endangerment?
What civil liberties are being infringed?
Is this going to destroy our economy and/or way of life?
These are the questions a Judge should be asking himself.
Blizzard made a stupid game where your fun and enjoyment is seriously dependent on the actions of other people. Certain people are acting like assholes. So Blizzard runs to the Judicial branch to punish the assholes. Give me a break. If we threw every asshole in America in jail there would be no one left. Blizzard should just fix their game or shut up.
Rasterization is order-independent because it doesn't matter what order you draw the objects. It doesn't matter because the z-buffer will ensure that only the visible surfaces are displayed. So to draw N objects you just draw them starting at object #1 and ending with object #N. You have to do N things, so the computational complexity is O(N).
Raytracing is the same. For every ray you have to check to see if it hit object #1 all the way through object #N. This is also N things so the complexity is O(kN) where k is the number of rays.
However, we can speed up the ray hit test by using a data acceleration structure such as an octree. The octree let's us ignore objects far away from the ray and only test the ones nearby. If you work through the math you will see that you only have to check log N objects instead of all N objects. This makes raytracing O(k log N).
However, we need an octree. And we have to rebuild that octree every frame because our game objects are moving around in unpredictable ways. We can't just freeze the animation. The position of objects relative to each other depend on what the player is doing, what the game AI is doing and what the physics engine is doing. Building the octree requires that we check all N objects for every level of the tree. If you do the math you will see that it takes O(N log N) steps to build the octree.
So, to render a game with a static raytracer we have to build an octree every frame and raytrace it. This is O(N log N) + O(k log N). The problem isn't the raytracer, it's sorting our objects every frame. This will always be slower than just drawing the objects directly regardless of whether you use rasterization or raytracing.
tl;dr. Raytracing is fast, but building the required octree is too slow and that's why rasterization is better.
Grr, this always happens. Why do people always compare static rendering with dynamic rendering? A billion dollar industry isn't wrong. Rasterization is better for games. Period.
Dynamic, order-independent rendering is O(n) no matter what rendering system you use. The oft-quoted O(log n) is only valid for static, order-dependent renderers! To turn a dynamic scene into a static one you have to sort the data into a static acceleration structure. Doing that takes you O(n log n) so order-independent rendering will always be better for dynamic scenes.
The thought might be good. But what percentage of our taxes will be listed as "other" for the NSA, CIA, classified Defense, State and God knows what?
There won't be anything listed under "Other". People don't report what they're working on. You've got it backwards. You find a funding source, tell them what you will do for them, then they agree to let you charge x hours to number yyy-zz. Now, if yyy-zz is for building a car, but you actually build a bike instead it doesn't matter. It will still show up on the accounting report as x hours for yyy-zz.
The charge number system is a chain of trust. Adjacent nodes in the hierarchy validate each other; e.g. the top level node cannot validate a bottom node. It would be too costly for every node in the graph to validate every other node. For computer scientists, the scalability is O(n^2). A chain of trust is O(n).
So, if Halo 3 had a detailed medical simulation modeling flesh impact, bone shattering, blood spurting, flying brain chunks and actual realistic death then it would be a perfect game suitable for children of all ages?
His predictions cover a lot of different industries and technology segments. For the areas that I understand well I think his predictions were pretty good. The only problem is that every time he says "commonplace" you have to replace it with "could be commonplace" or "commonplace in certain parts of the world and/or among certain demographics". A lot of the predictions look wrong on the surface but that is only because the technology flopped in the marketplace, or the demand only materialized in niche markets.
This is a consequence of how Kurzweil does his predictions. He measures technological progress in research labs and then projects it forward using a linear or exponential curve fit. It's quite rational and a lot of his projections are right. We have the technology to do most of the stuff he describes in sufficient volume to satisfy "commonplace" worldwide demand. But we don't do it because it's not profitable or because there are more interesting projects to which we would rather allocate our limited resources.
You have described the services that a healthy stock market provides for society. I'll comment on what our stock market is actually doing today in the US.
1) the stock market makes it possible to invest in companies at fractional rates, allowing capital to flow from small pools (you and me) to companies who seek investment capital. Without the stock market, only large investors could invest in companies, which would make it more difficult for enterpreneurs to raise funds.
As a stock market investor I get no admittance to board meetings, no guarantee of dividend payouts and no preferential liquidation rights. All I get are shareholder votes and an invitation to the annual shareholder's meeting. Both of these privileges are a joke.
People today are not "investing" via the stock market; they are gambling on stock values rising. When stock values rise this doesn't inject capital into corporations, it just puts paper profits into the pockets of the shareholders.
I've had two startup companies and there was no way we could have used the stock market to raise funds. The stock market is universally seen as an exit strategy. You have to get your capital by wooing investors. And, real investors expect valuable privileges like board seats, dividends, price protection, preferential liquidation rights, etc.
2) The stock market provides liquidity for those investors who have new information about companies, and therefore want to get rid of their investment. The market makes it possible to sell. Again, this makes people more willing to provide investment funds, because of the existance of an exit strategy/mechanism.
Oh man, I wish the stock market actually did provide liquidity. Sure, you can buy and sell as much as you like when there's nothing going on. But, when you really need it the liquidity disappears because everyone else needs it too. There are no explicit mechanisms in the US stock market to provide liquidity. Nobody is under any obligation to trade stock with you. Market makers are not obligated to fill your orders, they only have to advertise an accurate price (i.e. fill the order or change the price).
The point being made tho is not whether or not 45k is a decent wage, but instead how the producers of the art get 45k while the suits get 11 million.
Your math is wrong. The band gets $180,000 after-tax money. The record company gets $11,000,000 pre-tax money. The band has 4 members. The record company assigns 50 employees to the marketing and release of the band's work. The band gets $45,000 per capita. That is equivalent to a $64,000 salary at a 29.7% tax rate. The record company gets $220,000 per capita.
The band created the product and bore all of the financial burden. The record company provided labor and took all of the financial risk.
I usually think of a game genre as defined by two influential games rather than just one. The first one is the game that made all the game developers sit up and realize that the genre was going to be huge. The second one is the game that made the consumers take notice.
RTS: Dune 2 for developers, C&C for players
FPS: Wolfenstein for developers, Doom for players
MMO: UO for developers, EverQuest for players
By looking at the differences between the first game and the second game you can figure out what matters most to the consumer in each genre. For example, developers went gaga over Wolfenstein but consumers didn't get on board until Doom. Clearly it was the graphics that made the difference.
Almost, but your use of the term "virtual memory" is ambiguous. There is actually a dual paging system underlying all modern computers. To prevent exactly the kind of confusion we are seeing in this thread we call one kind of paging "memory" and the second kind "addressing".
Physical memory = the storage area of your RAM
Virtual memory = a storage area set aside on your hard disk
Physical addressing = a global shared map which converts an index into a location in physical memory.
Virtual addressing = a per-process map which converts an index into a location in physical memory.
Virtual memory is a technique used to increase the amount of memory storage available at the cost of performance. Virtual addressing is a technique used to simplify some of the housekeeping that the OS performs and to prevent applications from corrupting each other's memory spaces.
A modern OS will use virtual addressing to assign every user process a private memory space. These spaces do not overlap. By changing the virtual address map, an OS can move around physical memory and assign it to different processes. This is one kind of paging. A modern OS can also use virtual memory to store some memory pages to disk. This is a second kind of paging.
Modern CPUs support virtual addressing in hardware so there is very little performance penalty. The advantage of safer memory spaces far outweigh the performance loss. I doubt anybody is still using physical addressing for user processes today.
However, since disk access is much slower than memory access, there is a significant penalty for using virtual memory. Recently, memory access speed has grown much faster than disk access. So the relative performance of virtual memory has fallen.
Now we start digging. Previous missions revealed that the Martian surface looks the same everywhere. Now, we are hoping to find interesting stuff by going downward.
Just rename the file to match the name of a popular pornographic actress and upload it to a filesharing network. Your saved games will be around longer than you.
Here's how I see it. Take this with a huge grain of salt.
Prior to mid 20th century the research community was very small. Very few PhDs were given out and most research was funded by private interests. These private citizens were taking large financial risks to invent something new which could benefit everybody. The government decided this was a good thing and provided a patenting service to protect innovation.
WWI and especially WWII really changed people's view of science. Suddenly science was important because it could win wars. This led to tremendous government investment in research. Today our society is producing lots of graduate students. They go on to do innovative work in national research labs and universities. Their funding mostly and increasingly comes from the government.
Please excuse this cliche, but it really makes sense here.
1. Work at a national research lab.
2. Invent something risky and innovative. But, do not patent it yet!
3. Commercialize the technology in a startup company. Note, that the big risky part was paid for by the government.
4. Now you patent as a private company.
5. Use your monopoly to profit!
There are lots of variations on this general theme. In short: a private company can reap the benefits of the patent system while avoiding most of the financial risks.
It seems like the government is getting ripped off so why don't they put a stop to it? The answer is because the government isn't a for-profit business. Innovation occurs and the economy benefits. Mission accomplished, right?
It's actually the uneducated taxpayers that are getting ripped off. Basically they work and pay taxes so that a selected few can go to top ten schools and profit off the system. BTW, it's not just the people that are directly funded that benefit. It's also all the other graduates and alumnus that go to work in industry. They indirectly benefit because the government has massively subsidized their top notch education in the form of grants to the professors at top universities.
I painted it black and white, but the real world is shades of gray. There is a lot of great research being done in the private sector. And there are private companies which fund the risky development part. They certainly deserve a patent to protect their investment. I just don't see how we can reliably identify which inventions were privately funded and which were government funded. It seems that we need to either shut down the military-industrial complex and go back to privately funded, patent-protected innovation, or open the floodgates of government funding and get rid of the patent system.
That's all for now, thanks for reading. I have to get back to work on step 3.:)
That's not a solution. It's a workaround for a bug.
Blocking attachments that may contain viruses or spam is a form of security theatre. By coddling people and 'protecting them from themselves' we're denying them the opportunity to achieve true security. Only they can do it. The bottom line is that people have to learn not to take candy from strangers.
The best we can do is to provide tools to help people manage their decisions. i.e. whitelists and blacklists.
"He was reserving his right to refuse business to anyone."
First off, it's not "his" right. As a place of business the store had to get a license from the city. The rights of a business are not the same as the rights of an individual. This may seem nitpicky, but this is just a prelude for my second point.
Secondly, he wasn't refusing business to "anyone". He was refusing business to a class of people. Most parts of the US call this discrimination and it is illegal. His manager acted prudently and responsibly.
Don't be silly. Of course you can filter out a radio transciever. The facility where I work has a secure room for doing classified government work. I assure you, no EM gets in or out of that room. Of course, that kind of shielding is expensive to install.
This is a great paper even though the implementation is fairly simplistic. A good idea is one which makes you immediately think of a dozen ways to change it. This is a good idea.
Consider the simple example:
hello world
32332 32333 = 27
after three cuts we have:
hll wrld
333 3333 = 21
The next cut could be bad. But, with error diffusion
hll wrld
445 4433 = 27
That's better. Now, replace letters with pixels in an image. Then apply a better diffusion method (linear or exponential falloff).
There are lots of fun ways to modify this basic algorithm.
Slashdot Mirror
The photos on his website are amazing. However, nearly every photo is a long exposure shot. What a let down. You can make any crazy picture you want with a long exposure shot. These pictures are not real. If you were actually standing there you wouldn't see it.
To his credit, he explains exactly how every shot was made and what the exposure settings were. He's not trying to trick anybody. But, it seems like most people are willing to trick themselves.
Also, you would call him a "da Vinci or our time"? Please mods, don't mod stuff like that up.
If you haven't yet, download Prime95 right now and run it on your Windows systems.
http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft/
I've found that the prime95 stress test will catch errors that memtest won't. You need to run prime95 twice. Once right after booting the system, and a second time after the system has been running for more than a week (and in use for that week). Each run should be at least 1 hour.
:%s/Steam/physical media/g
So, I guess you don't buy any games at all?
I'm shocked no one has mentioned this yet. I want a depth/distance value. There's a lot of very interesting research that can be applied to pictures with an attached distance map.
My next desire is position/orientation of the camera body. Again, this is needed to enable some very interesting 3D reconstruction stuff.
This is horrible. How does crap like this get modded up? A "hot" game in 1989 would be something like Tetris. What's the price of Tetris today? About 5 bucks. The entire thesis of the post (that games have become too expensive over time) is wrong.
If you enjoy playing simple games like Asteroids, Pitfall and King's Quest then this is a good time to be alive. You can play games essentially identical to these top hits of yesteryear for free on the web. But, if you enjoy playing far more complicated games like Half-Life, Company of Heroes, and Fallout 3 then you should be thankful that there are people out there willing to pay $60 to encourage the software and hardware R&TD work that is required to make those games possible.
Lastly, why are you even upset? You rant about about how games are too expensive, but then tell a nice story about how you were able to buy 12 quality titles for cheap on Steam. So, you were able to get what you want at a price that you found acceptable. It sounds to me like the pricing structure of games is quite healthy. The people that want to pay more (you refer to them as idiots), can pay more. The people that want to pay less (you), can pay less. Everybody wins. What's the problem?
The PC computing model is commercially dead. Microsoft is trying to transition to the game console business model. We sell you a Microsoft machine. You can buy Microsoft approved first and third party titles. We make sure everything works. You can turn your brain off.
The classic PC model (my computer, keep your hands off) will live on thanks to the power of open source but it will not sustain commercial products.
Geez, you guys make this sound way more complicated than it really is. The Judicial branch of the US government does not exist to mindlessly enforce the laws that Congress pass. Their job is to act as a check and balance on Congress.
Where is the public endangerment?
What civil liberties are being infringed?
Is this going to destroy our economy and/or way of life?
These are the questions a Judge should be asking himself.
Blizzard made a stupid game where your fun and enjoyment is seriously dependent on the actions of other people. Certain people are acting like assholes. So Blizzard runs to the Judicial branch to punish the assholes. Give me a break. If we threw every asshole in America in jail there would be no one left. Blizzard should just fix their game or shut up.
Vincent, I will explain why it is a big deal.
Rasterization is order-independent because it doesn't matter what order you draw the objects. It doesn't matter because the z-buffer will ensure that only the visible surfaces are displayed. So to draw N objects you just draw them starting at object #1 and ending with object #N. You have to do N things, so the computational complexity is O(N).
Raytracing is the same. For every ray you have to check to see if it hit object #1 all the way through object #N. This is also N things so the complexity is O(kN) where k is the number of rays.
However, we can speed up the ray hit test by using a data acceleration structure such as an octree. The octree let's us ignore objects far away from the ray and only test the ones nearby. If you work through the math you will see that you only have to check log N objects instead of all N objects. This makes raytracing O(k log N).
However, we need an octree. And we have to rebuild that octree every frame because our game objects are moving around in unpredictable ways. We can't just freeze the animation. The position of objects relative to each other depend on what the player is doing, what the game AI is doing and what the physics engine is doing. Building the octree requires that we check all N objects for every level of the tree. If you do the math you will see that it takes O(N log N) steps to build the octree.
So, to render a game with a static raytracer we have to build an octree every frame and raytrace it. This is O(N log N) + O(k log N). The problem isn't the raytracer, it's sorting our objects every frame. This will always be slower than just drawing the objects directly regardless of whether you use rasterization or raytracing.
tl;dr. Raytracing is fast, but building the required octree is too slow and that's why rasterization is better.
Grr, this always happens. Why do people always compare static rendering with dynamic rendering? A billion dollar industry isn't wrong. Rasterization is better for games. Period.
Dynamic, order-independent rendering is O(n) no matter what rendering system you use. The oft-quoted O(log n) is only valid for static, order-dependent renderers! To turn a dynamic scene into a static one you have to sort the data into a static acceleration structure. Doing that takes you O(n log n) so order-independent rendering will always be better for dynamic scenes.
The thought might be good. But what percentage of our taxes will be listed as "other" for the NSA, CIA, classified Defense, State and God knows what?
There won't be anything listed under "Other". People don't report what they're working on. You've got it backwards. You find a funding source, tell them what you will do for them, then they agree to let you charge x hours to number yyy-zz. Now, if yyy-zz is for building a car, but you actually build a bike instead it doesn't matter. It will still show up on the accounting report as x hours for yyy-zz.
The charge number system is a chain of trust. Adjacent nodes in the hierarchy validate each other; e.g. the top level node cannot validate a bottom node. It would be too costly for every node in the graph to validate every other node. For computer scientists, the scalability is O(n^2). A chain of trust is O(n).
So, if Halo 3 had a detailed medical simulation modeling flesh impact, bone shattering, blood spurting, flying brain chunks and actual realistic death then it would be a perfect game suitable for children of all ages?
/facepalm
His predictions cover a lot of different industries and technology segments. For the areas that I understand well I think his predictions were pretty good. The only problem is that every time he says "commonplace" you have to replace it with "could be commonplace" or "commonplace in certain parts of the world and/or among certain demographics". A lot of the predictions look wrong on the surface but that is only because the technology flopped in the marketplace, or the demand only materialized in niche markets.
This is a consequence of how Kurzweil does his predictions. He measures technological progress in research labs and then projects it forward using a linear or exponential curve fit. It's quite rational and a lot of his projections are right. We have the technology to do most of the stuff he describes in sufficient volume to satisfy "commonplace" worldwide demand. But we don't do it because it's not profitable or because there are more interesting projects to which we would rather allocate our limited resources.
1) the stock market makes it possible to invest in companies at fractional rates, allowing capital to flow from small pools (you and me) to companies who seek investment capital. Without the stock market, only large investors could invest in companies, which would make it more difficult for enterpreneurs to raise funds.
As a stock market investor I get no admittance to board meetings, no guarantee of dividend payouts and no preferential liquidation rights. All I get are shareholder votes and an invitation to the annual shareholder's meeting. Both of these privileges are a joke.
People today are not "investing" via the stock market; they are gambling on stock values rising. When stock values rise this doesn't inject capital into corporations, it just puts paper profits into the pockets of the shareholders.
I've had two startup companies and there was no way we could have used the stock market to raise funds. The stock market is universally seen as an exit strategy. You have to get your capital by wooing investors. And, real investors expect valuable privileges like board seats, dividends, price protection, preferential liquidation rights, etc.
2) The stock market provides liquidity for those investors who have new information about companies, and therefore want to get rid of their investment. The market makes it possible to sell. Again, this makes people more willing to provide investment funds, because of the existance of an exit strategy/mechanism.
Oh man, I wish the stock market actually did provide liquidity. Sure, you can buy and sell as much as you like when there's nothing going on. But, when you really need it the liquidity disappears because everyone else needs it too. There are no explicit mechanisms in the US stock market to provide liquidity. Nobody is under any obligation to trade stock with you. Market makers are not obligated to fill your orders, they only have to advertise an accurate price (i.e. fill the order or change the price).
The point being made tho is not whether or not 45k is a decent wage, but instead how the producers of the art get 45k while the suits get 11 million.
Your math is wrong. The band gets $180,000 after-tax money. The record company gets $11,000,000 pre-tax money. The band has 4 members. The record company assigns 50 employees to the marketing and release of the band's work. The band gets $45,000 per capita. That is equivalent to a $64,000 salary at a 29.7% tax rate. The record company gets $220,000 per capita.
The band created the product and bore all of the financial burden. The record company provided labor and took all of the financial risk.
I usually think of a game genre as defined by two influential games rather than just one. The first one is the game that made all the game developers sit up and realize that the genre was going to be huge. The second one is the game that made the consumers take notice.
RTS: Dune 2 for developers, C&C for players
FPS: Wolfenstein for developers, Doom for players
MMO: UO for developers, EverQuest for players
By looking at the differences between the first game and the second game you can figure out what matters most to the consumer in each genre. For example, developers went gaga over Wolfenstein but consumers didn't get on board until Doom. Clearly it was the graphics that made the difference.
Almost, but your use of the term "virtual memory" is ambiguous. There is actually a dual paging system underlying all modern computers. To prevent exactly the kind of confusion we are seeing in this thread we call one kind of paging "memory" and the second kind "addressing".
Physical memory = the storage area of your RAM
Virtual memory = a storage area set aside on your hard disk
Physical addressing = a global shared map which converts an index into a location in physical memory.
Virtual addressing = a per-process map which converts an index into a location in physical memory.
Virtual memory is a technique used to increase the amount of memory storage available at the cost of performance. Virtual addressing is a technique used to simplify some of the housekeeping that the OS performs and to prevent applications from corrupting each other's memory spaces.
A modern OS will use virtual addressing to assign every user process a private memory space. These spaces do not overlap. By changing the virtual address map, an OS can move around physical memory and assign it to different processes. This is one kind of paging. A modern OS can also use virtual memory to store some memory pages to disk. This is a second kind of paging.
Modern CPUs support virtual addressing in hardware so there is very little performance penalty. The advantage of safer memory spaces far outweigh the performance loss. I doubt anybody is still using physical addressing for user processes today.
However, since disk access is much slower than memory access, there is a significant penalty for using virtual memory. Recently, memory access speed has grown much faster than disk access. So the relative performance of virtual memory has fallen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_table>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_memory>
Now we start digging. Previous missions revealed that the Martian surface looks the same everywhere. Now, we are hoping to find interesting stuff by going downward.
If your terminal honors ANSI escape codes then 'echo' is not safe either.
Just rename the file to match the name of a popular pornographic actress and upload it to a filesharing network. Your saved games will be around longer than you.
Here's how I see it. Take this with a huge grain of salt.
Prior to mid 20th century the research community was very small. Very few PhDs were given out and most research was funded by private interests. These private citizens were taking large financial risks to invent something new which could benefit everybody. The government decided this was a good thing and provided a patenting service to protect innovation.
WWI and especially WWII really changed people's view of science. Suddenly science was important because it could win wars. This led to tremendous government investment in research. Today our society is producing lots of graduate students. They go on to do innovative work in national research labs and universities. Their funding mostly and increasingly comes from the government.
Please excuse this cliche, but it really makes sense here.
1. Work at a national research lab.
2. Invent something risky and innovative. But, do not patent it yet!
3. Commercialize the technology in a startup company. Note, that the big risky part was paid for by the government.
4. Now you patent as a private company.
5. Use your monopoly to profit!
There are lots of variations on this general theme. In short: a private company can reap the benefits of the patent system while avoiding most of the financial risks.
It seems like the government is getting ripped off so why don't they put a stop to it? The answer is because the government isn't a for-profit business. Innovation occurs and the economy benefits. Mission accomplished, right?
It's actually the uneducated taxpayers that are getting ripped off. Basically they work and pay taxes so that a selected few can go to top ten schools and profit off the system. BTW, it's not just the people that are directly funded that benefit. It's also all the other graduates and alumnus that go to work in industry. They indirectly benefit because the government has massively subsidized their top notch education in the form of grants to the professors at top universities.
I painted it black and white, but the real world is shades of gray. There is a lot of great research being done in the private sector. And there are private companies which fund the risky development part. They certainly deserve a patent to protect their investment. I just don't see how we can reliably identify which inventions were privately funded and which were government funded. It seems that we need to either shut down the military-industrial complex and go back to privately funded, patent-protected innovation, or open the floodgates of government funding and get rid of the patent system.
That's all for now, thanks for reading. I have to get back to work on step 3. :)
That's not a solution. It's a workaround for a bug.
Blocking attachments that may contain viruses or spam is a form of security theatre. By coddling people and 'protecting them from themselves' we're denying them the opportunity to achieve true security. Only they can do it. The bottom line is that people have to learn not to take candy from strangers.
The best we can do is to provide tools to help people manage their decisions. i.e. whitelists and blacklists.
Who cares how much they play with the Wii. There's only one thing that matters.
Are they satisfied with their purchase and will they buy a Wii2?
"He was reserving his right to refuse business to anyone."
First off, it's not "his" right. As a place of business the store had to get a license from the city. The rights of a business are not the same as the rights of an individual. This may seem nitpicky, but this is just a prelude for my second point.
Secondly, he wasn't refusing business to "anyone". He was refusing business to a class of people. Most parts of the US call this discrimination and it is illegal. His manager acted prudently and responsibly.
Don't be silly. Of course you can filter out a radio transciever. The facility where I work has a secure room for doing classified government work. I assure you, no EM gets in or out of that room. Of course, that kind of shielding is expensive to install.
This is a great paper even though the implementation is fairly simplistic. A good idea is one which makes you immediately think of a dozen ways to change it. This is a good idea.
Consider the simple example:
hello world
32332 32333 = 27
after three cuts we have:
hll wrld
333 3333 = 21
The next cut could be bad. But, with error diffusion
hll wrld
445 4433 = 27
That's better. Now, replace letters with pixels in an image. Then apply a better diffusion method (linear or exponential falloff).
There are lots of fun ways to modify this basic algorithm.