Now that its tagged and *if* you share it, they'll know exactly whose sharing it and can prosecute.
No, they can't. Just because your watermark appears on a download doesn't mean you violated copyright. For example, someone may have broken into your machine and copied the files without your knowledge.
You can get much more detailed information about how a pen is held, about the timing and order of strokes, and how much pressure is excerted with a modern computer tablet. Even if you have all that information, you don't get anywhere near "100% accuracy" for signature verification. Since the data they work with contains less information, we can pretty much conclude that it must be their experiments that are poorly done, not that they have hit on some amazing new technique.
That isn't to say that the technique is completely useless. But it won't solve the problem of document forgeries.
You don't want to remove them all. Plain text alone tends to bore the viewers,
I didn't say "remove all graphical elements".
In any case, if you have an interesting message and deliver it well, you don't need "slides" at all, except when you actually need to show images that are part of the message. Yes, there used to be a time when people showed slides only if it was absolutely necessary for the content.
But unless you're a very charismatic and interesting speaker, you need a little something in your PowerPoint to help keep your audience interested.
Well, so you have a choice: you can practice becoming a better speaker, or you can practice inserting meaningless graphics into PowerPoint slides. Which one do you think is better?
Apple and their fan base keep making claims that Macintosh is easier to use and less confusing, but can you point us at independent studies demonstrating that?
Price discrimination is when I charge a rich person $20 for a hamburger and a poor person $2 for the same hamburger, even though the hamburger cost me $1 to make. Why? Because I want all the money I can get from each person who can afford to pay.
It may or may not be illegal to look at your customer and charge a price based on what you see, but it is certainly not illegal to come up with different versions of a product: a garish "low-end" version targetted at youth and a sleek "high-end" version targetted at business users, both of which work similarly and cost the same to produce. A lot of modern corporate profitmaking is based on just that approach.
Of course, that kind of pricing is a market inefficiency: lack of information on the part of users, monopoly rents, you name it. In this case, however, Linux presents the solution: it gives you an uncrippled $0 alternative to Windows XP Starter Edition.
But, hey, I have to say: if Microsoft started selling "starter edition" in the US, I'd buy it next time instead of Windows XP Home Edition; after all, the only use I have for Windows is occasionally running some proprietary software or a game, and for that "starter edition" is sufficient.
Since the 70s, scientists and sci-fi authors have been promising that a revolution, including real AI, is "just around the corner". But the elusive breakthroughs recede further into the distance the more progress is made.
First of all, research on AI started decades earlier than the 70's. And there is nothing really "elusive" about AI: researchers are making steady progress. Full AI is still not "just around the corner", but it will happen this century. Advances in processing power and reductions in hardware costs are just as important as new methods.
However, one important thing AI researchers have learned already is that natural intelligence is a lot more limited than we used to think.
Are they correct? Is geolocation content censorship impossible?"
Yes, they are.
The real question to me is: why would anybody want to watch the games anyway? They have become a celebration of commercialism, advertising, manipulation, politics, and nationalism. They let athletes destroy their bodies and rebuild them with medicine, yet they have hangups about drugs and genetic enhancements. The Olympics are a joke--and not a very funny one.
If by "our current mess", you mean terrorist threats, no, dependence on foreign oil by itself isn't responsible for that--plenty of nations are dependent on foreign oil without being terrorist targets. US attempts to keep oil prices artificially low by military and political means is what's responsible.
We need to wean ourselves off oil not to achieve autarky, but simply because oil itself is bad, no matter where it is produced.
But if you are dreaming of energy autarky, hydrogen could actually help with that, since the US has plenty of regions capable of producing hydrogen from solar energy.
From sea water--there are plenty of desert regions next to the ocean (actually, it doesn't even matter whether the regions are technically deserts, it matters that they get a lot of sunshine). The entire Mediterranean coast works, the Atlantic coast of Africa, and the coastal areas of the Middle East. So do Central America, much of the Gulf, and Northern South America, as well as parts of Australia.
A few hundred miles can be easily bridged by pipelines (sea water going one direction, hydrogen going the other).
Proximity to the ocean is also good for being able to ship the liquefied hydrogen back to the US.
Um, what about the trasport of raw hydrogen. [...] It reacts with almost any chemical in the air producing even greatter polution
The only thing in the air hydrogen will react with is oxygen, giving water. Hydrogen is non-poisonous. And while it is flammable and explosive, it is far less of a risk than most other fuels (among other things because it is lighter than air). An accident like the Exxon Valdez with hydrogen would have no impact on the environment.
I know that Ford is working on using hydrogen bound up in a soap chemical. This could be one solution to the problem. Another is to make methanol and ethonal from plants. You can break it down in the car and get hydrogen from it. So I am wondering if it is really worth the effort with the way things look right now.
Small scale hydrogen storage (in personal vehicles) is still somewhat of a technical problem, and those are possible solutions to that. But for large volume shipping, liquid hydrogen tanker ships are safe and cost effective.
you have to think about the COST of living in cities. Sometimes it is simply too expensive to have an apartment,
You also have to think of the COST of living in suburbia: maintaining a car, maintaining your own house, maintaining a yard, driving long distances to do anything.
Hydrogen has to come from someplace. It takes energy to produce hydrogen. Currently more energy goes into making hydrogen than is produced.
Quite correct. Hydrogen is a means of safely storing and transporting energy that has been produced from renewable sources. For example, you can produce hydrogen from solar energy in desert regions and then transport it to industrialized nations.
But the previous poster brought up Biodiesel which is far more mature and cost effective for the state of the world economy. Use biodiesel as the tippy cup which well get us off the tit of fossil fuels and then we can move onward.
I don't see why the two choices have to be government administration and private ownership. Why not sell limited term (say, 5-50 year) leases with competitive bids? That way, businesses can develop spectrum, but the public still retains control in the long term.
The key differences between C# and Java are philosophy and licenses.
Java's philosophy is built around WORA and enforced standardization, courtesy of Sun Microsystems.
C# is just a language, like C or C++--it comes with a small standard library, but what you do with it beyond that is up to you. C# has a language standard, and an open one at that, but the degree to which you follow that is up to you.
Whether that is good or bad is a matter of needs and preferences. I think the level of enthusiasm C# and Mono have generated should tell you which way the wind is blowing.
Note that Mono is not just about cloning Microsoft. Mono is building an entire platform; part of that platform is Microsoft compatibility libraries, but most of it is actually based on open source APIs and libraries.
There is another choice for native GUIs using C# on Windows, Linux, and OS X: wx.NET, bindings of the wxWindows library to Mono and Microsoft's.NET implementation.
wxWindows is great because it gives you a uniform API across different platforms and toolkits, while at the same time using native widgets and giving you access to platform-specific features if you like.
Thats fine, but maitainability might become an issue simply because it is hard to find the people that code in it.
Maintainability becomes a problem when you hire the first guy off the street who only knows the fad-du-jour, Java or VB, for example. Using off-beat languages gives you a great deal of inherent quality control: people who interview for Python, Lisp, or ML jobs generally are of higher quality.
No-ones been hurt by sticking with the mainstream.
You can't have been on this planet very long: large groups of people behave in stupid and dangerous ways, whether it comes to politics or choice of programming languages.
Don't really see how you can compare a scripting language with an OO development language.
Python clearly is an object-oriented development language; it even has multiple inheritance. Python is pretty close in its semantics to Smalltalk, and there are several native compilers and environments for Python. So, Python really is much more than a "scripting language".
It's not clear that Java should even be called "object oriented". Alan Kay said "I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind." Well, Java's object system is even more restrictive than C++'s.
So, yes, it does make sense to talk about Java and Python and compare them.
What matters is what the license actually says. And the Java license (probably the Solaris license, too) is too restrictive: Sun gets legal control over the evolution of the platform, they get legal control over who implements it, they get legal control over many third-party contributions, and they even get legal control over the future work of people who look at their "open" source code. That's just a bad deal for both users and contributors.
If we accept Schwartz's argument that Sun's licenses are "open", then we just have to make an additional distinction: "good-for-users open licenses" and "bad-for-users open licenses"; many of Sun's licenses then fall in the "bad-for-users open license" category.
That's like the question "when did you stop beating your wife?", which simply plants the idea in everybody's head that the person questioned did, in fact, beat his wife.
The fact is that Linux does not have any more or less "patent issues" than any other OS: nobody who develops software and has good legal advice will try to do background searches on patents. Instead, the rational thing to do is to develop the software and then see who complains. As a result, just about every major piece of software infringes on lots of patents.
Given that Linux source code is out in the open, any patent holder who believes that their patent is being infringed can complain, and as soon as they do, the infringing code will be removed from Linux and life will go on.
VVAW wanted the U.S. to pull out of Vietnam and hand it over to the communists in Hanoi.
Yes, and your point is what exactly? Vietnam cost nearly 60000 US soldiers their lives. Another 4 million Vietnamese civilians died. The most pro-military stance anybody could take was to pull out as quickly as possible.
And that's not even counting the damage that the Vietnam war has done to the standing of the US in the world.
Not only that, but in the 1980's, Kerry was in favor of peaceful coexistance with the communist Soviet Union.
Well, imagine that: a leader that prefers peaceful co-existence to a global nuclear holocaust. And I think that defines the difference between Kerry and Bush.
So, if you want the US to go off causing the deaths of untold more millions and sacrificing hundreds of thousands of US soldiers in the name of ideology and political gain, vote for Bush. If you want a leader that values human life and peace, vote for Kerry.
The reason why Apple couldn't have caught on as a mainstream platform because it was too hard and too expensive to program for the standards at the time: initially, you needed to buy a Lisa to be a serious Macintosh developer. And even if you had that, the Mac application frameworks exceeded in terms of complexity what programmers were used to. DOS and early Windows were less capable, but they were of a complexity that programmers could deal with, and you could program them using cheap tools and cheap machines.
Apple's business decisions gave them one segment of the market, Microsoft's gave them another, and Sun got yet another. And none of them invented much of the basic technology themselves anyway: just like Windows was a stripped down version of Macintosh, so Macintosh was a stripped down version of the Xerox GUIs. And Sun's business was built on the software they had gotten from Berkeley.
None of those companies have anything to complain about: they made a lot of money with technology they got elsewhere, and they each got their market segment, to this day.
Sorry if you're too busy being snotty to see the big picture of "migration difficulty" in big business.
First, you made an argument about supposed lack of availability of software for Linux. When I pointed out that that argument didn't hold water, you switched to an argument that migration is costly.
The problem here isn't that I don't appreciate the cost of migrating to another platform (which I do), the problem here is that you can't get your argument straight.
And migration costs is the typical problem established companies face: companies like yours are the last to switch. The observation that there are plenty of apps for Linux matters to new companies, companies that aren't locked in yet like you are.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that its tagged and *if* you share it, they'll know exactly whose sharing it and can prosecute.
No, they can't. Just because your watermark appears on a download doesn't mean you violated copyright. For example, someone may have broken into your machine and copied the files without your knowledge.
You can get much more detailed information about how a pen is held, about the timing and order of strokes, and how much pressure is excerted with a modern computer tablet. Even if you have all that information, you don't get anywhere near "100% accuracy" for signature verification. Since the data they work with contains less information, we can pretty much conclude that it must be their experiments that are poorly done, not that they have hit on some amazing new technique.
That isn't to say that the technique is completely useless. But it won't solve the problem of document forgeries.
One question one needs to ask, however, is whether the authors have any connection to the maker of conoscopic holography equipment...
You don't want to remove them all. Plain text alone tends to bore the viewers,
I didn't say "remove all graphical elements".
In any case, if you have an interesting message and deliver it well, you don't need "slides" at all, except when you actually need to show images that are part of the message. Yes, there used to be a time when people showed slides only if it was absolutely necessary for the content.
But unless you're a very charismatic and interesting speaker, you need a little something in your PowerPoint to help keep your audience interested.
Well, so you have a choice: you can practice becoming a better speaker, or you can practice inserting meaningless graphics into PowerPoint slides. Which one do you think is better?
Apple and their fan base keep making claims that Macintosh is easier to use and less confusing, but can you point us at independent studies demonstrating that?
Price discrimination is when I charge a rich person $20 for a hamburger and a poor person $2 for the same hamburger, even though the hamburger cost me $1 to make. Why? Because I want all the money I can get from each person who can afford to pay.
It may or may not be illegal to look at your customer and charge a price based on what you see, but it is certainly not illegal to come up with different versions of a product: a garish "low-end" version targetted at youth and a sleek "high-end" version targetted at business users, both of which work similarly and cost the same to produce. A lot of modern corporate profitmaking is based on just that approach.
Of course, that kind of pricing is a market inefficiency: lack of information on the part of users, monopoly rents, you name it. In this case, however, Linux presents the solution: it gives you an uncrippled $0 alternative to Windows XP Starter Edition.
But, hey, I have to say: if Microsoft started selling "starter edition" in the US, I'd buy it next time instead of Windows XP Home Edition; after all, the only use I have for Windows is occasionally running some proprietary software or a game, and for that "starter edition" is sufficient.
Since the 70s, scientists and sci-fi authors have been promising that a revolution, including real AI, is "just around the corner". But the elusive breakthroughs recede further into the distance the more progress is made.
First of all, research on AI started decades earlier than the 70's. And there is nothing really "elusive" about AI: researchers are making steady progress. Full AI is still not "just around the corner", but it will happen this century. Advances in processing power and reductions in hardware costs are just as important as new methods.
However, one important thing AI researchers have learned already is that natural intelligence is a lot more limited than we used to think.
Just remove all the animations, gradients, and clipart and concentrate on the message.
Are they correct? Is geolocation content censorship impossible?"
Yes, they are.
The real question to me is: why would anybody want to watch the games anyway? They have become a celebration of commercialism, advertising, manipulation, politics, and nationalism. They let athletes destroy their bodies and rebuild them with medicine, yet they have hangups about drugs and genetic enhancements. The Olympics are a joke--and not a very funny one.
If by "our current mess", you mean terrorist threats, no, dependence on foreign oil by itself isn't responsible for that--plenty of nations are dependent on foreign oil without being terrorist targets. US attempts to keep oil prices artificially low by military and political means is what's responsible.
We need to wean ourselves off oil not to achieve autarky, but simply because oil itself is bad, no matter where it is produced.
But if you are dreaming of energy autarky, hydrogen could actually help with that, since the US has plenty of regions capable of producing hydrogen from solar energy.
In the USA, I'd say those costs are greatly reduced.
No, they are not: people just think they are. Car ownership and other costs of living in low density areas in the US is still hugely expensive.
Furthermore, a lot of the cost of suburban living is simply subsidized through taxes (road building, gas taxes, etc.).
From sea water--there are plenty of desert regions next to the ocean (actually, it doesn't even matter whether the regions are technically deserts, it matters that they get a lot of sunshine). The entire Mediterranean coast works, the Atlantic coast of Africa, and the coastal areas of the Middle East. So do Central America, much of the Gulf, and Northern South America, as well as parts of Australia.
A few hundred miles can be easily bridged by pipelines (sea water going one direction, hydrogen going the other).
Proximity to the ocean is also good for being able to ship the liquefied hydrogen back to the US.
Um, what about the trasport of raw hydrogen. [...] It reacts with almost any chemical in the air producing even greatter polution
The only thing in the air hydrogen will react with is oxygen, giving water. Hydrogen is non-poisonous. And while it is flammable and explosive, it is far less of a risk than most other fuels (among other things because it is lighter than air). An accident like the Exxon Valdez with hydrogen would have no impact on the environment.
I know that Ford is working on using hydrogen bound up in a soap chemical. This could be one solution to the problem. Another is to make methanol and ethonal from plants. You can break it down in the car and get hydrogen from it. So I am wondering if it is really worth the effort with the way things look right now.
Small scale hydrogen storage (in personal vehicles) is still somewhat of a technical problem, and those are possible solutions to that. But for large volume shipping, liquid hydrogen tanker ships are safe and cost effective.
you have to think about the COST of living in cities. Sometimes it is simply too expensive to have an apartment,
You also have to think of the COST of living in suburbia: maintaining a car, maintaining your own house, maintaining a yard, driving long distances to do anything.
Hydrogen has to come from someplace. It takes energy to produce hydrogen. Currently more energy goes into making hydrogen than is produced.
Quite correct. Hydrogen is a means of safely storing and transporting energy that has been produced from renewable sources. For example, you can produce hydrogen from solar energy in desert regions and then transport it to industrialized nations.
But the previous poster brought up Biodiesel which is far more mature and cost effective for the state of the world economy. Use biodiesel as the tippy cup which well get us off the tit of fossil fuels and then we can move onward.
Sure, biodiesel is good, too.
I don't see why the two choices have to be government administration and private ownership. Why not sell limited term (say, 5-50 year) leases with competitive bids? That way, businesses can develop spectrum, but the public still retains control in the long term.
Wait, I already have a platform!
Yes, and with Mono, you can continue using that platform: Gnome and Gtk and all that good stuff.
Heck, I've got a whole slew of platforms to choose from. Why should I throw them all away for a new unfinished one?
Right: that's exactly the question you should ask about Java.
The key differences between C# and Java are philosophy and licenses.
Java's philosophy is built around WORA and enforced standardization, courtesy of Sun Microsystems.
C# is just a language, like C or C++--it comes with a small standard library, but what you do with it beyond that is up to you. C# has a language standard, and an open one at that, but the degree to which you follow that is up to you.
Whether that is good or bad is a matter of needs and preferences. I think the level of enthusiasm C# and Mono have generated should tell you which way the wind is blowing.
Note that Mono is not just about cloning Microsoft. Mono is building an entire platform; part of that platform is Microsoft compatibility libraries, but most of it is actually based on open source APIs and libraries.
There is another choice for native GUIs using C# on Windows, Linux, and OS X: wx.NET, bindings of the wxWindows library to Mono and Microsoft's .NET implementation.
wxWindows is great because it gives you a uniform API across different platforms and toolkits, while at the same time using native widgets and giving you access to platform-specific features if you like.
Thats fine, but maitainability might become an issue simply because it is hard to find the people that code in it.
Maintainability becomes a problem when you hire the first guy off the street who only knows the fad-du-jour, Java or VB, for example. Using off-beat languages gives you a great deal of inherent quality control: people who interview for Python, Lisp, or ML jobs generally are of higher quality.
No-ones been hurt by sticking with the mainstream.
You can't have been on this planet very long: large groups of people behave in stupid and dangerous ways, whether it comes to politics or choice of programming languages.
Don't really see how you can compare a scripting language with an OO development language.
Python clearly is an object-oriented development language; it even has multiple inheritance. Python is pretty close in its semantics to Smalltalk, and there are several native compilers and environments for Python. So, Python really is much more than a "scripting language".
It's not clear that Java should even be called "object oriented". Alan Kay said "I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind." Well, Java's object system is even more restrictive than C++'s.
So, yes, it does make sense to talk about Java and Python and compare them.
What matters is what the license actually says. And the Java license (probably the Solaris license, too) is too restrictive: Sun gets legal control over the evolution of the platform, they get legal control over who implements it, they get legal control over many third-party contributions, and they even get legal control over the future work of people who look at their "open" source code. That's just a bad deal for both users and contributors.
If we accept Schwartz's argument that Sun's licenses are "open", then we just have to make an additional distinction: "good-for-users open licenses" and "bad-for-users open licenses"; many of Sun's licenses then fall in the "bad-for-users open license" category.
That's like the question "when did you stop beating your wife?", which simply plants the idea in everybody's head that the person questioned did, in fact, beat his wife.
The fact is that Linux does not have any more or less "patent issues" than any other OS: nobody who develops software and has good legal advice will try to do background searches on patents. Instead, the rational thing to do is to develop the software and then see who complains. As a result, just about every major piece of software infringes on lots of patents.
Given that Linux source code is out in the open, any patent holder who believes that their patent is being infringed can complain, and as soon as they do, the infringing code will be removed from Linux and life will go on.
VVAW wanted the U.S. to pull out of Vietnam and hand it over to the communists in Hanoi.
Yes, and your point is what exactly? Vietnam cost nearly 60000 US soldiers their lives. Another 4 million Vietnamese civilians died. The most pro-military stance anybody could take was to pull out as quickly as possible.
And that's not even counting the damage that the Vietnam war has done to the standing of the US in the world.
Not only that, but in the 1980's, Kerry was in favor of peaceful coexistance with the communist Soviet Union.
Well, imagine that: a leader that prefers peaceful co-existence to a global nuclear holocaust. And I think that defines the difference between Kerry and Bush.
So, if you want the US to go off causing the deaths of untold more millions and sacrificing hundreds of thousands of US soldiers in the name of ideology and political gain, vote for Bush. If you want a leader that values human life and peace, vote for Kerry.
The reason why Apple couldn't have caught on as a mainstream platform because it was too hard and too expensive to program for the standards at the time: initially, you needed to buy a Lisa to be a serious Macintosh developer. And even if you had that, the Mac application frameworks exceeded in terms of complexity what programmers were used to. DOS and early Windows were less capable, but they were of a complexity that programmers could deal with, and you could program them using cheap tools and cheap machines.
Apple's business decisions gave them one segment of the market, Microsoft's gave them another, and Sun got yet another. And none of them invented much of the basic technology themselves anyway: just like Windows was a stripped down version of Macintosh, so Macintosh was a stripped down version of the Xerox GUIs. And Sun's business was built on the software they had gotten from Berkeley.
None of those companies have anything to complain about: they made a lot of money with technology they got elsewhere, and they each got their market segment, to this day.
Sorry if you're too busy being snotty to see the big picture of "migration difficulty" in big business.
First, you made an argument about supposed lack of availability of software for Linux. When I pointed out that that argument didn't hold water, you switched to an argument that migration is costly.
The problem here isn't that I don't appreciate the cost of migrating to another platform (which I do), the problem here is that you can't get your argument straight.
And migration costs is the typical problem established companies face: companies like yours are the last to switch. The observation that there are plenty of apps for Linux matters to new companies, companies that aren't locked in yet like you are.