What about corporate use? Think broadly - DRM at your hospital can guarantee that your patient records are never leaked, on purpose or by accident. The powers that be do want to have absolute control of those records, and they should. Even with the best intentions and the most trusted people make mistakes and release data. Isn't it good to absolutely prevent that in this case?
Stairs, boulders and other obstacles - legs are much more versatile in uneven terrain than wheels or treads (treads are good for uneven terrain that is mostly continuous but fail when there are large jumps). If you have a two-story house most wheeled/treaded robots are useless. There are systems to get around that (for each wheel, use three wheels in a triangle that rotates over obstacles), but they quickly get unwieldy.
People also relate better emotionally to anthropomorphic things.
may induce corporations to rethink their software locking strategies
Or add weak encryption then sue under the DMCA
Re:I'll buy that piece of paper with some chocolat
on
Write Down Your Passwords
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
barring quantum computers, nobody's going to be breaking it within my lifetime.
Or research breakthroughs - nobody has yet proved that one-way functions exist, and it's entirely possible that some genius could figure out a fast factoring algorithm tomorrow and make your crypto worthless. Not likely, but a possibility worth considering.
IANAL also, but I do have a decent amount of mock trial and other legal experience (which convinced me to become an engineer and not a lawyer). Usually a document (email, letter, anything written) isn't allowed into court as evidence unless a witness testifying under oath can identify it. So usually you call the guy whose name is on it and ask if he wrote it, and he'll say yes because otherwise it's perjury.
If he does say no (or that he doesn't know), you can usually put together enough of a factual case that they had to have sent it to make them look like they are obviously lying. The factual case would be: IP address is registered to their subnet, IP logs showing their computer's MAC at that address, lots of email from that account with that IP and MAC (so it's not forged), etc. Once you make a good case that it's legit, they have to provide evidence, not just an allegation, that it's forged, or it gets in.
People do say that they don't remember writing it, etc., but the fact that it came from their account and has their name on it is usually pretty persuasive to a jury.
Of course, if there is an actual question about who wrote the message (e.g. it came from a family computer), and no one will authenticate it, it may very well not be allowed in court. Written documents like emails and letters can be a bitch to get in (anything with a signature is basically automatically admissible, which is why you sign legal documents among other reasons).
If piracy continues to increase for years on end, companies are going to start wondering what they are getting for the money they pay the BSA. After all, their job is to combat piracy, and reports like this show that they are failing at their job. If piracy never turns down, software companies will take their anti-piracy dollars elsewhere (or change strategy entirely).
I think progressive screens are slow to sell because people are waiting for HDTVs to come down in price. That's really the thing, I'm with you that $1k TVs will never sell, but from what I've heard they may drop in price significantly soon. Of course once the next generation comes out they'll drop again. I'm with you that I don't think they'll be the majority - many people don't even have cable and will never have anything more than just a TV. But price is only one factor in their slow adoption, content is another. I think eventually (a couple years) we'll see a huge upswing in adoption.
The problem with monitor-based gaming is it's inherently single-player due to the smaller screen, while a large portion of console gaming is multiplayer. Plus the ability to act as a DVD player and play music and video off of your PC add a lot of value to the device (and if they add a TV tuner there will be even more value). I think they figure that people who want to play games at their computer just play PC games, while people play console games for different reasons. Plus VGA output can be a pain to deal with in hardware if you're driving a lot of different frequencies, and it's not as plug and play because if someone sets it wrong they could blow their monitor.
Mainly, though, I think the HDTV output is designed to drive first-mover sales at $450 a pop. That said, the intent of my original post was to show that additional graphics power would, someday, be useful, and eventually it will be (if 50 years from now most people still have 640x480 TVs I will be mad, though I won't be one of them).
You need to shove 100 photons to reliably get 1 activation. You can shove 1 photon 100 times, or 100 photons at once. Either or.:)
Ah, we're sort of talking past each other. All I meant to say is that the eye (occasionally) detects single photons, not that it reliably does so. The neural paths going into visual cortex don't always relay the signal well either (though nowhere near 99% of the time). I haven't studied the quantum function of photoreceptors, my main interest is neural modeling and the neurology that it entails (so everything after the photon is detected). But still, for optimal visual performance you'd need a device that has photon resolution, you would just need to send every photon a lot of times. Since the eye's temporal resolution is poor that wouldn't be a problem.
Most TVs are not HDTVs currently, though. They really only need to worry about good old NTSC TVs.
Well, that's the case right now, but HDTVs are getting picked up pretty fast, and console support could be a big sales driver - one of the main factors holding HDTV back is lack of content. Plus these consoles will still be on the market in a few years when many more people will be using HDTVs. The other thing is that if these things (XBox and PS3) cost as much as they're rumored to, they're going to be targeted at a high-end market where HDTV ownership is more likely. I mean hell, for $450 they better have HDTV, watch my kids and cook popcorn.
Technically speaking a cone or rod is activated by a single photon. One photon doesn't rise about the noise level, so you don't consciously perceive it normally, but when a pattern of activity is present you can pick it up even though its components would normally be below threshold. Of course sending one photon at the eye doesn't mean it will hit a cone, but the brain takes this into account when processing cone activation. In any case, it's a purely theoretical question - a console that could generate photon-level graphics would max out the human visual capacity, and anything less wouldn't. You wouldn't consciously notice the difference, but there are situations where it would matter - e.g. the angle acuity task.
And I agree with you that maximum viewing power is limited by TV/display resolution, but console power is also required - an HDTV does no good if your console can only put out 640x480. Given that the XBox 360 doesn't put out 1080p, TV resolution and console capacity are probably well matched (i.e. if there were a higher-res TV it's likely that no current console could drive it at its top resolution).
Then there's the whole issue of stereoscopic vision - as retinal projection devices improve, stereoscopic displays become more practical, which requires around 2x the processing power. Also, add optical and head tracking and you need to increase processing power further (because your eyes move, and therefore the scene changes, fast and often, and there must be absolutely no delay or the viewer gets really nauseous). Sure, all far-future developments, but the whole point of my original post was that there are plenty of uses for additional console graphics power.
how much more power do games really need? Many games are perfectly enjoyable on systems like the Mega Drive already. The hardware capabilities of the game consoles of today are very close to just how much you need, because the human eye has it's own, physiological, treshold.
We are nowhere near our physical thresholds - the human eye can respond to a difference in line alignment of a few seconds of arc - the width of a pencil at 300 meters (look up hyperacuity). The eye can detect the presence of a single photon. But we're far, far away from that level of realism.
Consider it this way - if your gaming system can't render, say, The Incredibles (or any modern CG film) in real time, then it still has room for improvement. Until you literally cannot tell the difference between a console-rendered shot and a photograph, there is a use for more power. Sure, gameplay is important too, and games with bad graphics can be fun, but better graphics do improve the experience, and we have a long way to go before full photorealism.
If patents like these are this easy to get, MS really has no choice but to get them. If they don't, there will be 8 million Eolases suing them over BS. It's all well and good to say the system should be different, there should be no software patents, etc., but in the meantime it's either take out frivolous patents or get sued by someone else.
I differ in that I don't believe "collateral damage" makes one a terrorist if all possible precautions are taken to avoid it. In modern times the US military brings JAG lawyers to bombing sites to ensure that they are minimizing casualties. In WW II they didn't have the capacity to target bombs very accurately, so there was lots of collateral damage. But I do think things like the firebombing of Dresden or razing Vietnamese villages were wrong (and a waste of resources as well). It's not that there are "acceptable" levels of death, it's the attempt to minimize civilian deaths in an otherwise-legitimate military campaign that distinguishes one from terrorists: terrorist seek to maximize civilian deaths.
There's also a grey zone, though - when terrorists operate as a group (such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or the Iraqi insurgents), they are breaking international law because they are a military unit but do not identify themselves with uniforms and routinely operate in civilian areas. A huge proportion of the civilian deaths in anti-terror operations come for this reason - the Israeli army has to shoot at random people in an apartment building because an unmarked terrorist unit is operating from there. There isn't really an option except to shoot plainclothes people.
I'm with you that we need to examine the factors that feed terrorism, though. Calling people names (evil, terrorist, fanatic), even if accurate, does nothing to solve the problem.
Yes, that is correct, sorry - the threat is included as well. Economic damage counts as terrorism only inasmuch as it is an attempt to disable the normal functioning of a country - I don't think the burning of a ski lodge or the damage in Seattle during the WTO protests counts as terrorism, but the bombing of the 10 busiest highway intersections would be because it would be an attempt to stop the country from functioning and thereby violently precipitate the overthrow of the government. Most acts of property-only terrorism are aimed at a specific individual or business, whereas terrorism is aimed at society.
For a concrete example, the eco-thugs who burned the ski lodge in Colorado were criminals but not terrorists because they targeted a specific development, while the Basque bombings which injured nobody (they called ahead to warn) are terrorism because they are a threat to life.
There are two major advantages of the internet for dissidents that have no non-digital equivalent:
Truly anonymous communication - using public key encryption you can repeatedly communicate with people without having any information about them whatsoever except their public key. In the real world you have to have a phone number, common drop point, or other physical connector.
Mass publication - once your communique is published on a (foreign) web server, it's there for everyone to see forever, though you can restrict viewing to trusted parties only if desired.
While the internet isn't a golden bullet (to the head of your dictator or otherwise), it has certain important advantages that can't be obtained elsewhere).
A terrorist kills civilians. Civilians are non-uniformed personnel not affiliated with a military agency, not actively harming or imminently threatening the "terrorist's" physical safety, and not suspected of a crime (killing someone suspected of a crime without a trial is an extra-judicial execution, which is another matter). When engaging in total war (generally frowned upon) you can also kill civilians who are actively aiding military units without being a terrorist.
Dissidents protest, make signs, and get arrested. Sometimes they kill soldiers - then they are revolutionaries. But they do not kill innocent people on purpose.
The common ground that makes someone a terrorist or dissident rather than a criminal or whacko is that they aim to change government or society with an act or movement. The Rev. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks were dissidents, Osama Bin Laden and Eric Rudolph are terrorists.
There's a lot of BS in the political realm about this (eco-terrorists etc.) and we often overlook terrorism sponsored by our allies, but it's a really easy line to draw: if you kill known civilians, you are a terrorist.
You missed the point entirely. It's because undergrads have no history that the top undergrads are undervalued. On average they are valued correctly, but top undergrads are valued near the average because they have no history (ie no proof that they are the top). They are undervalued relative to their true value because of this.
1) Company A is honest but unknowingly employs dishonest programmer B. B uses GPL code to save time. Company A is accidentally using GPL code (ie if they knew they were using it, they would take it out).
2) Honest programmer C downloads code but can't find a license, or thinks the code is LGPL, or downloads it, copies the source (but not the license) somewhere, forgets it, then sees it on his disk 2 years later. Thinking it's internal code, he uses it without checking for a license.
Actually that's more than two ways, but you can see how it might happen.
Cars may be more simple than computers, but the world they exist in is not. The car has to handle bizarre and/or unpredictable situations like flooded roads, extreme fog, children by the side of the road, etc. As another posted mentioned, it would even have to deal with ethical dilemnas (swerve left and hit the schoolkids or right and hit the old lady?). The computers in the car right now already handle the majority of car-specific things. The big leap is adding interaction with the environment.
While I agree with the thrust of your post, there's one bone I have to pick.
Diffie-Hellman and all other nominal one-way functions haven't been proven secure - it could well be possible that one-way functions don't exist, in which case all security based on them is worthless. Even if OWFs do exist and Diffie-Hellman is one it is still breakable in exponential time, which is vulnerable if quantum computers (or equivalent) are developed, and could potentially be vulnerable to a specially-designed supercomputer. OTOH a functional quantum link is completely eavesdrop-proof when proper protocols are used.
Sure, most people don't have to worry about a secret D-H/OWF inverting algorithm, but for the NSA and some of the other people this is targeted at even that tiny bit of extra security is incredibly valuable.
The amount of money pouring into quantum cryptography almost makes you wonder if the NSA might have found that OWFs do not exist...
My understanding is that randomness of a sequence is measured as the degree of predictability: a sequence is random if you can't predict the next bit even if you know any other set of bits in the sequence. So if you have 1,0,1,0,1 and the next bit is 0 with 100% probability, it's not random, but if the next bit is 0 with 50% probability it is. Just being given a portion of a sequence it's not possible to deterministically compute the probability, but it can be computed to within a (exponentially decreasingly small) margin of error. So from a sequence you can't determine if something is truly random, but you can get 99.9999% sure that is.
This is the degree of randomness: they can say that pi is less random than various RNGs because given a few digits of pi, you can calculate remaining digits with 50%+n accuracy, while given the same number of digits from a pseudorandom generator the odds of getting the next bit right are 50%+1/2^-s where s is a large number determined by which RNG you use, among other things. For pi, n is unknown, but these researchers are saying it's not small and possibly not even exponentially small. Truly random has n=0, but exponentially small is good enough for practical use.
And for the sticklers, pseudorandom != random and there are other issues about that too, but that's for another post. Also as a side note, IIRC the absolute predictability of any set of digits of pi from any other set has not been generally ruled out.
Forget even the potential liability - just the legal costs would be more than the settlement, it's a no-brainer to settle. A decent lawyer will cost you a few thousand dollars just to read the case and show up to a preliminary hearing, to actually argue the case would cost well over $10k in legal fees. Of course RIAA gets it cheaper because they're using staff lawyers.
And if you add it all up you really get off pretty cheaply even if you do get sued - you got to listen to 3k songs for a few years without paying, and when you do pay it's only at $2 a song or so including legal costs. It's really not nearly as bad a deal as it seems - given that you have only a small chance of getting sued, your expected cost from downloading is far less than the $1/song it costs to buy from iTunes.
Or are the accounts not even supposed to be that little bit wrong ?
They're allowed a lot of room to be inaccurate, which is why their projected revenue was $9.7 to $9.8 billion - there's a hundred million dollars of wiggle room built in. Also, due to the law of large numbers there should be less variation with numbers this large (that's a total approximation, the LoLN doesn't exactly apply but it comes close).
That said, it's not a big miss, and a lot of it was due to accounting maneuvers or one-time charges, which is why the stock jumped so much.
I second this - Archos players running Rockbox are simple, cheap, and sturdy (I drop mine on concrete at least once a month). If they break (which they have a tendency to do) they do it within a month and you can return it under warranty. They play standard MP3s and act just like an external hard drive when plugged in to your computer. I'm extremely happy with mine.
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What about corporate use? Think broadly - DRM at your hospital can guarantee that your patient records are never leaked, on purpose or by accident. The powers that be do want to have absolute control of those records, and they should. Even with the best intentions and the most trusted people make mistakes and release data. Isn't it good to absolutely prevent that in this case?
Stairs, boulders and other obstacles - legs are much more versatile in uneven terrain than wheels or treads (treads are good for uneven terrain that is mostly continuous but fail when there are large jumps). If you have a two-story house most wheeled/treaded robots are useless. There are systems to get around that (for each wheel, use three wheels in a triangle that rotates over obstacles), but they quickly get unwieldy.
People also relate better emotionally to anthropomorphic things.
may induce corporations to rethink their software locking strategies
Or add weak encryption then sue under the DMCA
barring quantum computers, nobody's going to be breaking it within my lifetime.
Or research breakthroughs - nobody has yet proved that one-way functions exist, and it's entirely possible that some genius could figure out a fast factoring algorithm tomorrow and make your crypto worthless. Not likely, but a possibility worth considering.
IANAL also, but I do have a decent amount of mock trial and other legal experience (which convinced me to become an engineer and not a lawyer). Usually a document (email, letter, anything written) isn't allowed into court as evidence unless a witness testifying under oath can identify it. So usually you call the guy whose name is on it and ask if he wrote it, and he'll say yes because otherwise it's perjury.
If he does say no (or that he doesn't know), you can usually put together enough of a factual case that they had to have sent it to make them look like they are obviously lying. The factual case would be: IP address is registered to their subnet, IP logs showing their computer's MAC at that address, lots of email from that account with that IP and MAC (so it's not forged), etc. Once you make a good case that it's legit, they have to provide evidence, not just an allegation, that it's forged, or it gets in.
People do say that they don't remember writing it, etc., but the fact that it came from their account and has their name on it is usually pretty persuasive to a jury.
Of course, if there is an actual question about who wrote the message (e.g. it came from a family computer), and no one will authenticate it, it may very well not be allowed in court. Written documents like emails and letters can be a bitch to get in (anything with a signature is basically automatically admissible, which is why you sign legal documents among other reasons).
If piracy continues to increase for years on end, companies are going to start wondering what they are getting for the money they pay the BSA. After all, their job is to combat piracy, and reports like this show that they are failing at their job. If piracy never turns down, software companies will take their anti-piracy dollars elsewhere (or change strategy entirely).
I think progressive screens are slow to sell because people are waiting for HDTVs to come down in price. That's really the thing, I'm with you that $1k TVs will never sell, but from what I've heard they may drop in price significantly soon. Of course once the next generation comes out they'll drop again. I'm with you that I don't think they'll be the majority - many people don't even have cable and will never have anything more than just a TV. But price is only one factor in their slow adoption, content is another. I think eventually (a couple years) we'll see a huge upswing in adoption.
The problem with monitor-based gaming is it's inherently single-player due to the smaller screen, while a large portion of console gaming is multiplayer. Plus the ability to act as a DVD player and play music and video off of your PC add a lot of value to the device (and if they add a TV tuner there will be even more value). I think they figure that people who want to play games at their computer just play PC games, while people play console games for different reasons. Plus VGA output can be a pain to deal with in hardware if you're driving a lot of different frequencies, and it's not as plug and play because if someone sets it wrong they could blow their monitor.
Mainly, though, I think the HDTV output is designed to drive first-mover sales at $450 a pop. That said, the intent of my original post was to show that additional graphics power would, someday, be useful, and eventually it will be (if 50 years from now most people still have 640x480 TVs I will be mad, though I won't be one of them).
You need to shove 100 photons to reliably get 1 activation. You can shove 1 photon 100 times, or 100 photons at once. Either or. :)
Ah, we're sort of talking past each other. All I meant to say is that the eye (occasionally) detects single photons, not that it reliably does so. The neural paths going into visual cortex don't always relay the signal well either (though nowhere near 99% of the time). I haven't studied the quantum function of photoreceptors, my main interest is neural modeling and the neurology that it entails (so everything after the photon is detected). But still, for optimal visual performance you'd need a device that has photon resolution, you would just need to send every photon a lot of times. Since the eye's temporal resolution is poor that wouldn't be a problem.
Most TVs are not HDTVs currently, though. They really only need to worry about good old NTSC TVs.
Well, that's the case right now, but HDTVs are getting picked up pretty fast, and console support could be a big sales driver - one of the main factors holding HDTV back is lack of content. Plus these consoles will still be on the market in a few years when many more people will be using HDTVs. The other thing is that if these things (XBox and PS3) cost as much as they're rumored to, they're going to be targeted at a high-end market where HDTV ownership is more likely. I mean hell, for $450 they better have HDTV, watch my kids and cook popcorn.
Technically speaking a cone or rod is activated by a single photon. One photon doesn't rise about the noise level, so you don't consciously perceive it normally, but when a pattern of activity is present you can pick it up even though its components would normally be below threshold. Of course sending one photon at the eye doesn't mean it will hit a cone, but the brain takes this into account when processing cone activation. In any case, it's a purely theoretical question - a console that could generate photon-level graphics would max out the human visual capacity, and anything less wouldn't. You wouldn't consciously notice the difference, but there are situations where it would matter - e.g. the angle acuity task.
And I agree with you that maximum viewing power is limited by TV/display resolution, but console power is also required - an HDTV does no good if your console can only put out 640x480. Given that the XBox 360 doesn't put out 1080p, TV resolution and console capacity are probably well matched (i.e. if there were a higher-res TV it's likely that no current console could drive it at its top resolution).
Then there's the whole issue of stereoscopic vision - as retinal projection devices improve, stereoscopic displays become more practical, which requires around 2x the processing power. Also, add optical and head tracking and you need to increase processing power further (because your eyes move, and therefore the scene changes, fast and often, and there must be absolutely no delay or the viewer gets really nauseous). Sure, all far-future developments, but the whole point of my original post was that there are plenty of uses for additional console graphics power.
how much more power do games really need? Many games are perfectly enjoyable on systems like the Mega Drive already. The hardware capabilities of the game consoles of today are very close to just how much you need, because the human eye has it's own, physiological, treshold.
We are nowhere near our physical thresholds - the human eye can respond to a difference in line alignment of a few seconds of arc - the width of a pencil at 300 meters (look up hyperacuity). The eye can detect the presence of a single photon. But we're far, far away from that level of realism.
Consider it this way - if your gaming system can't render, say, The Incredibles (or any modern CG film) in real time, then it still has room for improvement. Until you literally cannot tell the difference between a console-rendered shot and a photograph, there is a use for more power. Sure, gameplay is important too, and games with bad graphics can be fun, but better graphics do improve the experience, and we have a long way to go before full photorealism.
If patents like these are this easy to get, MS really has no choice but to get them. If they don't, there will be 8 million Eolases suing them over BS. It's all well and good to say the system should be different, there should be no software patents, etc., but in the meantime it's either take out frivolous patents or get sued by someone else.
I differ in that I don't believe "collateral damage" makes one a terrorist if all possible precautions are taken to avoid it. In modern times the US military brings JAG lawyers to bombing sites to ensure that they are minimizing casualties. In WW II they didn't have the capacity to target bombs very accurately, so there was lots of collateral damage. But I do think things like the firebombing of Dresden or razing Vietnamese villages were wrong (and a waste of resources as well). It's not that there are "acceptable" levels of death, it's the attempt to minimize civilian deaths in an otherwise-legitimate military campaign that distinguishes one from terrorists: terrorist seek to maximize civilian deaths.
There's also a grey zone, though - when terrorists operate as a group (such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, or the Iraqi insurgents), they are breaking international law because they are a military unit but do not identify themselves with uniforms and routinely operate in civilian areas. A huge proportion of the civilian deaths in anti-terror operations come for this reason - the Israeli army has to shoot at random people in an apartment building because an unmarked terrorist unit is operating from there. There isn't really an option except to shoot plainclothes people.
I'm with you that we need to examine the factors that feed terrorism, though. Calling people names (evil, terrorist, fanatic), even if accurate, does nothing to solve the problem.
Yes, that is correct, sorry - the threat is included as well. Economic damage counts as terrorism only inasmuch as it is an attempt to disable the normal functioning of a country - I don't think the burning of a ski lodge or the damage in Seattle during the WTO protests counts as terrorism, but the bombing of the 10 busiest highway intersections would be because it would be an attempt to stop the country from functioning and thereby violently precipitate the overthrow of the government. Most acts of property-only terrorism are aimed at a specific individual or business, whereas terrorism is aimed at society.
For a concrete example, the eco-thugs who burned the ski lodge in Colorado were criminals but not terrorists because they targeted a specific development, while the Basque bombings which injured nobody (they called ahead to warn) are terrorism because they are a threat to life.
There are two major advantages of the internet for dissidents that have no non-digital equivalent:
While the internet isn't a golden bullet (to the head of your dictator or otherwise), it has certain important advantages that can't be obtained elsewhere).
A terrorist kills civilians. Civilians are non-uniformed personnel not affiliated with a military agency, not actively harming or imminently threatening the "terrorist's" physical safety, and not suspected of a crime (killing someone suspected of a crime without a trial is an extra-judicial execution, which is another matter). When engaging in total war (generally frowned upon) you can also kill civilians who are actively aiding military units without being a terrorist.
Dissidents protest, make signs, and get arrested. Sometimes they kill soldiers - then they are revolutionaries. But they do not kill innocent people on purpose.
The common ground that makes someone a terrorist or dissident rather than a criminal or whacko is that they aim to change government or society with an act or movement. The Rev. Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks were dissidents, Osama Bin Laden and Eric Rudolph are terrorists.
There's a lot of BS in the political realm about this (eco-terrorists etc.) and we often overlook terrorism sponsored by our allies, but it's a really easy line to draw: if you kill known civilians, you are a terrorist.
You missed the point entirely. It's because undergrads have no history that the top undergrads are undervalued. On average they are valued correctly, but top undergrads are valued near the average because they have no history (ie no proof that they are the top). They are undervalued relative to their true value because of this.
There are at least two ways:
1) Company A is honest but unknowingly employs dishonest programmer B. B uses GPL code to save time. Company A is accidentally using GPL code (ie if they knew they were using it, they would take it out).
2) Honest programmer C downloads code but can't find a license, or thinks the code is LGPL, or downloads it, copies the source (but not the license) somewhere, forgets it, then sees it on his disk 2 years later. Thinking it's internal code, he uses it without checking for a license.
Actually that's more than two ways, but you can see how it might happen.
Cars may be more simple than computers, but the world they exist in is not. The car has to handle bizarre and/or unpredictable situations like flooded roads, extreme fog, children by the side of the road, etc. As another posted mentioned, it would even have to deal with ethical dilemnas (swerve left and hit the schoolkids or right and hit the old lady?). The computers in the car right now already handle the majority of car-specific things. The big leap is adding interaction with the environment.
While I agree with the thrust of your post, there's one bone I have to pick.
Diffie-Hellman and all other nominal one-way functions haven't been proven secure - it could well be possible that one-way functions don't exist, in which case all security based on them is worthless. Even if OWFs do exist and Diffie-Hellman is one it is still breakable in exponential time, which is vulnerable if quantum computers (or equivalent) are developed, and could potentially be vulnerable to a specially-designed supercomputer. OTOH a functional quantum link is completely eavesdrop-proof when proper protocols are used.
Sure, most people don't have to worry about a secret D-H/OWF inverting algorithm, but for the NSA and some of the other people this is targeted at even that tiny bit of extra security is incredibly valuable.
The amount of money pouring into quantum cryptography almost makes you wonder if the NSA might have found that OWFs do not exist...
My understanding is that randomness of a sequence is measured as the degree of predictability: a sequence is random if you can't predict the next bit even if you know any other set of bits in the sequence. So if you have 1,0,1,0,1 and the next bit is 0 with 100% probability, it's not random, but if the next bit is 0 with 50% probability it is. Just being given a portion of a sequence it's not possible to deterministically compute the probability, but it can be computed to within a (exponentially decreasingly small) margin of error. So from a sequence you can't determine if something is truly random, but you can get 99.9999% sure that is.
This is the degree of randomness: they can say that pi is less random than various RNGs because given a few digits of pi, you can calculate remaining digits with 50%+n accuracy, while given the same number of digits from a pseudorandom generator the odds of getting the next bit right are 50%+1/2^-s where s is a large number determined by which RNG you use, among other things. For pi, n is unknown, but these researchers are saying it's not small and possibly not even exponentially small. Truly random has n=0, but exponentially small is good enough for practical use.
And for the sticklers, pseudorandom != random and there are other issues about that too, but that's for another post. Also as a side note, IIRC the absolute predictability of any set of digits of pi from any other set has not been generally ruled out.
Forget even the potential liability - just the legal costs would be more than the settlement, it's a no-brainer to settle. A decent lawyer will cost you a few thousand dollars just to read the case and show up to a preliminary hearing, to actually argue the case would cost well over $10k in legal fees. Of course RIAA gets it cheaper because they're using staff lawyers.
And if you add it all up you really get off pretty cheaply even if you do get sued - you got to listen to 3k songs for a few years without paying, and when you do pay it's only at $2 a song or so including legal costs. It's really not nearly as bad a deal as it seems - given that you have only a small chance of getting sued, your expected cost from downloading is far less than the $1/song it costs to buy from iTunes.
has already cracked it. With a Sharpie.
Or are the accounts not even supposed to be that little bit wrong ?
They're allowed a lot of room to be inaccurate, which is why their projected revenue was $9.7 to $9.8 billion - there's a hundred million dollars of wiggle room built in. Also, due to the law of large numbers there should be less variation with numbers this large (that's a total approximation, the LoLN doesn't exactly apply but it comes close).
That said, it's not a big miss, and a lot of it was due to accounting maneuvers or one-time charges, which is why the stock jumped so much.
I second this - Archos players running Rockbox are simple, cheap, and sturdy (I drop mine on concrete at least once a month). If they break (which they have a tendency to do) they do it within a month and you can return it under warranty. They play standard MP3s and act just like an external hard drive when plugged in to your computer. I'm extremely happy with mine.
I know a nice Nigerian man who can help you out...