Innovation needs to be rewarded. How many of you have signed contracts that give *any* invention you create to your employer as a condition of having a job? How may of you have the means to quit to pursue making a business out of your invention? (Hint: You ALL signed one, and you can't if you have a family). And if you did manage to start a business, would you have a legal fund to defend yourself from getting "wallet-whipped" form the inevitable lawsuits?
Well, quite spewing nonsense...
Yes, many sign non-compete contracts, and you can very well end up giving up rights to ideas, inventions, copyrights, etc. to you employer. However, many employers do not enforce them with few exceptions, and even those that do try have had issues. For example, look at the Mattel vs. Bratz lawsuit - the creator of Bratz use to work at Mattel creating Barbie dolls, so Mattel sued to try to shutdown Bratz - they lost.
I also know of a few people who despite having a family started a company, and I'm sure there are many many more. It's all a matter of having the will power and mindset to do so - to overcome the issues and achieve your goals whatever they may be.
Oh, and don't forget that even when a company does completely own what you work on, they may not be interested in it at all. The company I current work for was founded a result of such work. The founder developed the technology while working for another company; they were not interested in it, so he left and started a company around it - we're now top of the industry. Many have done similar with Microsoft and other big corporations, sometimes to get bought back later; though most go on their own separate path from the original company they "spawned" off of.
.Applies to every satellite State of Britain, former and current
current yes - so long as the State of Britain continues to recognize it; former, not necessarily. For example, while the US Constitution and laws may or may not have laws similar to Magna Carta 1297 Section 61, it does not actually recognize the Magna Carta 1297 as a binding legal document for the United States of America; thus. Magna Carta 1297 can say whatever it wants but it does not apply to the United States of America - this despite that the USA can be considered a former satellite state of Britain. and several other European countries (e.g. France, Portugal, Spain,..) as represented by the various colonies and settlements (the 13 colonies, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, California, etc.).
Repeat after me, the first two words in one time pad are?
Your scheme can have a name, but it can't start, "one time" okay?
The original one-time pad is only ever used once - on the second message transmitted. This is a true one-time pad scheme, just applied with a slightly different data sourcing mechanism to allow both sides to communicate.
A 100% secure one-time pad does as slew suggests per a statistically provable fully random data source - but both sides have to have access to that same data source, or a synchronized version of it at the very least. This imposes a limit on the parties that can communicate using the one-time pad mechanism. That is, it can't replace SSL, Diffie-Hellman Key Exchanges, etc as those are typically used by two parties that may not be aware of each other until the session is created.
Conversely, my proposal would enable the use of a one-time pad scheme to replace SSL or a Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange, but as I noted it has its limits too so it is still not without fault but it might be good enough for some uses.
I don't think you understand the theory behind a one-time pad. Basically the one-time pad is unbreakable if the pad is not predictable (not that it is some arbitrary data stream) which usually requires it to be random. If you use some well-known text as a one time pad or a pad stream with non-uniform statistical properties (say attackable via english letter or word frequency analysis), then your one-time pad is not only theoretically breakable, in practice it's probably not very secure either.
For example, if you knew the pad-stream and the plain-text are both english text, you could xor the "encrypted" data with the 4 characters "space", ETAONRS (some of the most frequent letters), and try to recover likely characters and spaces. As we know, knowing the first and last letter of a word, some words are easy to figure out.
For a one-time pad cipher to be throretically unbreakable, the pad-stream must in practice be random (or created using an essentially random source).
True. As I said, it is not without its flaws, and it depends on its use. In some cases it may be good enough - but there are certainly limits to what I proposed (which I acknowledged in the proposal) for the security to remain sufficient.
P(0) is transmitted in unencrypted and contains O.
P(1) * O = C(1)
P(2) * P(1) = C(2)
P(3) * P(2) = C(3)
...
P(N) * P(N-1) = C(N)
The difference is you are using the unencrypted text to make the next encryption. Otherwise yes you are correct.
And I do agree there is a vulnerability there, but don't necessarily agree that it is easy to tease out unless you are able to capture the first message - P(0).
A one time pad allows you to encrypt one bit of plaintext per bit of key. If you use that plaintext to communicate a new key, you gain precisely nothing.
You're not quite following what I am suggesting, which is along the following:
build a protocol that the initial message communicates a one-time pad to be applied in the subsequent message, such as the entire first message itself.
the each message exchanged uses the decoded previous message as its one-time pad after the initial message is communicated
The only big issue with the above is when the message being sent is larger than the message received. However, that could be resolved by buffering the old messages and only tossing away the data as it is used for the one-time pad, so if the message is sufficiently larger than the few messages after it it may be a few messages before those messages are used in the one-time pad. Of course, you will have a problem if there is not enough data to properly apply a one-time pad to the larger message, but that could be managed by the protocol - e.g. generate a message that sends back a dummy message to get additional data for more one-time pads to have sufficient information. This also means that any two parties would be essentially making new key-exchanges with each message set sent/received.
Now of course, the main security issue is that the entire one-time pad is in the data stream itself. Intercept the data stream and you could have sufficient information to decode it if you knew how the protocol worked and buffered enough of it to decode the one-time pads. Depending on the use, it may be just as secure as a true one-time pad if all messages were equally sized so that you had to get the initial message to really be able to decode anything.
So, I am not saying it is not without fault but that depending on use, it may be good enough.
Now, to your comment, you don't really seem to understand a true one-time pad. The algorithm is rather simple - is just an XOR of bytes over the message. The hard part is the data source. In a true one-time pad all parties wishing to communicate have access to the same exact data source and know where the other is going to operate within that data source to encode the information. This is truly secure - unbreakable - so long as you do not repeat over the same data set.
That is, a one-time pad is secure as long as the source for the one-time pad is never reused. Think of a file of random data. You share the file with the other party and you both exchange data using a known offset into the file. If you both start at the start of the file then as long as you never wrap around to the start of the file you have a secure means of communication that cannot be broken. If you start to wrap around the file, so you start repeating the use of the data used for the one-time pad then the source information can eventually be decoded from the data stream by pattern recognition techniques thus defeating the security of the one-time pad. This is resolved by simply using a file that is large enough to never be wrapped by the data you communicate. Such methods are used by the NSA and CIA and others to securely communicate information with a guarantee that no-one else can intercept and decode the data.
Now back to my proposal - the source of the one-time pad becomes the data stream itself. This has a slight fault in that the source is available, but if properly utilized may be just as secure. The primary vulnerability is receipt of the first message since the second message would use it to pad itself when responding.
Also, you don't typically use a one-time pad to communicate something to setup a key-exchange for Diffie-Hellman or RSA. They have their own protocol already for doing the key exchange. In the case of Diffie-Hellman, you send the public information of your key and get back the public information for the other party's key. You then both use your own private key with the o
This doesn't help with one of the most common uses of asymmetric keys, which is secure initial key exchange...
You could probably build the one-time pad into the initial message and then use the data stream itself to continue the one-time pad on. It does leave you vulnerable to anyone that receives that initial message, but would probably be otherwise unbreakable unless you start repeating a lot of data in the data stream - but then, even a true one time pad would then be vulnerable too.
LFS has only one use - teaching you how to build a distribution should you want to be the next Red Hat, SuSe, Gentoo, etc. It does not belong any where near a real Linux installation - server OR desktop.
Do you have any reasons why "it does not belong any where near a real Linux installation"? Gentoo is, perhaps, even worse than an Ubuntu distribution in many circumstances. Unless you really know what you are doing, you're very likely to break things on a Gentoo distro.
To start with, LFS's goal is NOT to be a real Linux installation. It's stated goal is to teach you how to build a distribution so that you may then go off and do so (http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/); even if you derive it from LFS. However, please note how few distributions are derived from LFS.
If you won't want to use Gentoo, then use Slackware and install everything from source yourself. That's the only thing better than using Gentoo. And even LFS is sissified in comparison.
Also I'm betting you've never installed LFS. If you know what you are doing, you have almost ultimate control over your system with LFS. I'm betting the reason most people don't run it as a server is because it would be way too much effort to learn how to build an entire operating system just to run a server. Oh and let me know if you can think of a reason why it's "sissified".
I've gone through LFS before, and it's rather cumbersome. You also don't need most of their patches, which at least at the time I did they claimed were required to make a distribution system, but really you didn't - I used vanilla sources just fine.
People don't use LFS for a server or desktop because there is no real process for keeping it up to date, getting security fixes, etc. It's entirely up to you to do the work. And every now and again they release a new copy of the documentation for building the whole thing over with new patches, updated software, etc - but no migration from an older build. You're on your own.
So really, you're no better off than doing Slackware and then building all your own software from source - at least then, you have the advantage of using PkgTool when you want to install something from Slackware instead of rolling your own. (Though you could do that under LFS too, but it's much quicker to just start with Slackware instead of LFS.)
But honestly, if you really want to get 100% out of your system configuration and run a system built from source, then there is nothing like Gentoo which makes it extremely easy to do, complete with updates, security patches, and a full set of methods to keep a consistent system build going as well as a lot larger community to help out in the rare instances you do actually run into trouble. And yes, Gentoo is used on many servers too - even allowing you to build on a non-production system to make rolling out to production systems very easy (emerge package && quickpkg package, transfer to the other computer, and emerge the prebuilt package).
Gentoo is for sissies who like having their hands held and bottoms wiped. Real men - you know, the kind with beards and repulsive body odor - use Linux From Scratch.
LFS has only one use - teaching you how to build a distribution should you want to be the next Red Hat, SuSe, Gentoo, etc. It does not belong any where near a real Linux installation - server OR desktop.
If you won't want to use Gentoo, then use Slackware and install everything from source yourself. That's the only thing better than using Gentoo. And even LFS is sissified in comparison.
TFA starts off by framing it correctly but before the end of the first page already leaps into incorrect debate.
But why all this confusion between mental processes, ideas, mathematics, software and inventions? I believe the main reason is that for the past 45 years those for or against software patents have been debating the wrong question. They've been asking: "Is software patentable?"
A very different debate
I believe the debate would have been very different if it focused on the question: "Is an invention that is patentable in hardware, equally patentable if implemented in software?" Recently, Silicon Valley debated the question of software patents and innovation.
(Italics added)
The question he is posing is only part of the question that he is claiming has been asked and is incorrect. That is, if software itself is not patentable, then the natural result is that something that is patentable in hardware is not patentable when implemented solely in software; however, the versus is not true - if you deem that anything implemented in hardware is patentable but its software implementation is not, then that does not mean that all software is not patentable.
This only goes to show that the software industry has been asking the right question by first asking whether software - any software - is patentable first and foremost.
However, even changing the argument as he wants still renders a flawed analysis. Why? Because as others here have pointed out the patent on the hardware implementation is not simply the function of the hardware implementation but the entirety of the implementation itself - the layout, the components, the interconnects, the materials, the dimensions, and the function; where as a software patent is simply the function - anything else it the mathematic model to produce the function - but that is not enough to make something patentable as it is by nature abstract and (per SCOTUS) non-patentable.
'm sure lots of people will bring up the fact that shipped phones does not have a 1-to-1 correlation to sold phones. They may not sell and be returned to the manufacturer. That being said, how many times could HTC or Samsung or any other company get away with over shipping devices that don't sell before retailers stop ordering as many devices? I seriously doubt HTC is shipping vast quantities of phones in these numbers that didn't sell.
Well, it doesn't reach 1:1 mostly because you'll get some that are defective in some manner no matter what you do. So the stores return those and replace them with another from their stock. You might even get someone picking up a phone at one store and having it swapped out at another store, though that will vary by what the carriers allow the associated stores to do. So, it's probably more like 100:99 than 1:1 in the end, but it all comes down to the QA each company has - both the phone provider and the stores themselves. And obviously they want to get as close to that 1:1 ratio as they can.
Well, let's see for that one worker that is contracted to the government the companies also add on their own overhead costs which is not simply training, computers, facilities,etc - but also includes all management from the worker to the corporate officers as well.
So it's kind of like this (just a guess at the numbers):
1 IT worker at $35/hr.
1 IT worker's manager at $5/hr
1 IT worker's manager's manager at $5/hr (repeat per each level of management)
1 IT worker's business unit overhead (finance, payroll, etc.) at $5/hr (repeat for each level of the organization)
Now that's just the worker - no computer, office space, etc.
Now I worked for one of the big DoD contractors a few years back. Between me and the corporate officers were about 7 layers of management and business units (just to the Sector level of the company; the company also had a corporate sector that oversaw all of the sectors, of which I have no idea how many levels there were - but we'll assume at least 2 levels) - so that's 9 levels of management that they would account for - so $35+ 9*$5 + 9*$5 + $5 for $130/hr for someone at even a relatively low "grade" level - i.e. it only goes up from there.
Now, I don't know the exact numbers for the above, so it may work out a little differently but it basically does add up that way.
There is an easy fix for this. Make patents non-transferable. Whomever invents something can claim a patent on the invention and reap the benefits for a limited time. Once the inventor dies, or the company folds or gets bought, the invention becomes public domain.
The real problem is that patents or no longer a means, they are the end.
Agreed that patents should be non-transferrable.
However, there is also another solution - define the patent life-time by the time it takes to recoupe investment + a given percentage of profit (less that 50%, probably 10-20% of the investment), and have a branch of the USPTO be setup to review business plans both with patent applications (does it meet the criteria; is the time-line reasonable; is the price reasonable; etc.) and with granted patents (performance progress). Some things that may be patentable will payoff quickly (investment+profit) before the patent could be granted and thereby it would quickly enter into the public domain; however, things that are not of much interest to the world may take a long time to payoff and have a longer life. The cost of the bureaucracy to support this is simply the cost of supporting patents, and it would let the markets truly decide the life of the patent grant on a per-patent, per-industry, etc. basis. Sadly, the entrenched players will not let it happen since most patents would probably pay out before a grant would/could be given, and many things (like software) would simply not be worth it to patent as a result - an automatic check & balance in the approach.
What you would do is get access points for your business from large companies then counter sue them. They made the purportedly infringing devices and you bought it from them. It's their problem.
If Cisco and Motorola as were mentioned in the story as going to court on this got thousands of lawsuits each, there would be some urgency on their part.
Or rather, when they file against you, you just file that they need to be suing the manufacturer instead, and you request the manufacturer to stand in. The court should recognize it especially if the manufacturer decides to step up. If they don't, then you threaten to remove their equipment and replace it with a competitors that will stand up. If none do, then you remove the technology and file accordingly. (That won't absolve the complaint but it will help shut things down.)
If enough people do that, then the manufacturers will be forced to step in. But you have to get people to do that to start with instead of just settling. What is surprising it that the various companies in-house counsel or outside counsel are not advising them to do so.
Okay, so you add software culpability laws. But where do you draw the line of culpability?
Most software uses a toolkit of some sort - WxWidgets, Qt, MFC,.Net, Gtk, etc - to build upon. Is the application provided culpable for the bugs in the toolkits? Or do they simply say "that's a toolkit bug" so the user has to go after the toolkit vendor directly? or are we going to end up with a fantastically lawsuit encouraging environment where the user goes after the application developer who has to turn around and go after the toolkit vendor who...
And of course, then you get into the hard-to-replicate bugs. What kind of bug is allowed to be sued for? One that occurs once but kills all the data? Or must it be repeatable? For that matter, how to you certify that the bug is indeed in the application and not in the hardware? Or even which application it is in?
For example, Compaq had a big bug in their Floppy Controllers years back that would randomly cause the floppy to not write data to disk. They later settled. But how would you prove that the bug was not in say Microsoft Windows or Linux and that it was indeed in the Floppy Controller? And who would the user have to go after? Would they have to go after the application vendor, who would go after the OS vendor, who would go after the hardware vendor?
Furthermore, how do you define that it is a bug? Do you specify a reference platform? Can each vendor specify a separate reference platform or does the law specify the platform? If the law, how does innovation in the platforms occur without the reference platform becoming obsolete? How does the vendor, how to does the user stand to win anything if their system doesn't match the reference platform? Either way, it's self-defeating.
Where does it end?
The problem with software, as compared to the rest of the world (and even computer hardware), is that the rules are all off when changing environments and nearly every computer is different from every other computer. Take two computers with Windows installed - even the same version of Windows - and you'll likely have them installed to different patch levels or have different device drivers - even if you bought both at the same time from the same place and bought the same models; and if you didn't 100% lock it down directly after the purchase before any user got on it, then there is likely different software installed too, so they quickly diverge to become different environments.
No other industry has that kind of change in environment for their products. In some respects its amazing that software manages to work at all given all the changes between when developers make the software and when the user actually uses the software the developers released on their computer.
And it happened to blacks to a greater extent because poverty was more prevalent in the black community. To a middle-class person living on welfare is a huge step down from what they're used to. If you grew up in poverty, however, living in poverty for free beats the crap out of working your ass off to live in poverty.
Not really. The growth of the middle class has mostly been due to the various movements since the 1920's. Prior to the entry of the unions, most would still have been considered near poverty levels. So it's not a matter of how many were in poverty, but how the community responds to circumstances that lead to or away from generational poverty. The European and Asian descendant communities don't have that problem. And you can't blame in on slavery either - which equally affected the European descendant communities for nearly as long. There were also a lot of European descendants that knew poverty from the Great Depression too, but it only drove them to do better not live off the state for the most part.
Prior to this whole welfare system being setup the black communities did pretty well, and like the white communities had a sense of pride in doing good work for good money. Yes, there was a racial disadvantage but they didn't let that stop them.
And while the Civil Rights Movement on the whole was a good thing, it also had an unintended consequence when combined with welfare and African Heritages Moment that ended up destroying that aforementioned sense of pride, which has resulted into today's ever increasingly impoverished black community that doesn't take so much pride in doing good work for a good money, but denigrates itself into much worse status than was afforded even before the Civil Rights Movement and potentially even before the Emancipation Proclamation.
While there is a substantial issue with poverty and cyclic jail terms for the black community, nothing is more damaging in terms of breaking the cycle to the black community than its own members putting each other down for trying to do better academically. This has nothing to do with slavery, or anything else other than internal racism by the black community.
Interesting that you mention that, as that has little to do with lingering effects of slavery, and more to do with the design of the welfare system which back in the 1960's-1980's helped destroy the basic family unit in black communities when families could get more from welfare for a single mom with children than they could if dad was home too. Thus divorce rates went up so that the family could get more entitlements from the state.
So why didn't that happen to the white community? I mean, aside from the impoverished portion of the white community to which it did happen.
Happened there too - just far more prevalent in the black community.
I'm personally not buying the whole "Global Warming" bit, and I felt Al Gore's film was based primarily on FUD and Guilt (there were parts such as the little "story" about his child... irrelevant) and known-massaged numbers. Before somebody jumps up and down and screams "denier" or some other goofy label - let's be clear that I think there is some "Global Climate Change" going on, which we may or may not contributing to. The evidence has been shown both ways, and honestly I'm having a REALLY hard time believing either side considering all the bogus political grandstanding they've both had. It's time to remove the vested interests and get some real science done to figure out if we're gonna cook, cool, or just have to do this thing we've been doing for a few thousand years called Adapt. That's my two hopefully unbiased cents.
Agreed, though I think it will be a long time (likely centuries) really before we really have an answer. In the mean-time, we'll be figuring out the various cyclic events - we've generally understood the 10-year cycles, but don't have any real grasp on the 50, 100, or greater cycles. (And no, looking a core samples from trees and ice, etc are not going to give you the information you need to determine those cycles as there is a lot more information required than will be able to be retrieved from those kinds of data points however interesting they may be.)
It's not so much about the past slavery, segregation, etc., but rather the institutionalized poverty that came with it that still lingers. Unfortunately it has become a feedback loop, which doesn't help anyone.
Interesting that you mention that, as that has little to do with lingering effects of slavery, and more to do with the design of the welfare system which back in the 1960's-1980's helped destroy the basic family unit in black communities when families could get more from welfare for a single mom with children than they could if dad was home too. Thus divorce rates went up so that the family could get more entitlements from the state.
This in turn yielded families without father figures, which then pushed more children into street gangs, and started what is now a hard-to-break cycle (especially) for black males of prison terms - rotating between gang life, fathering children, and prison. Again, leaving the mothers home with the children, and also not entering marriages nearly as often. Some try to encourage their children not to follow their own footsteps, but since they're in prison (and sometimes mom too) there is no one home long enough to prevent it, and the cycle continues.
Add to that the intra-black community racism where they encourage each other not to do as well as they could in school as they would otherwise be "too white" in the eyes of their peers, and it only further breaks it all down, and suppresses the income levels for those students in the long term.
All of the above is well documented in numerous news coverages throughout the years, and is the #1 reason for the poverty rates in the black communities. It has absolutely zero to do with segregation, slavery, racism by non-black people, etc; and everything to do with the internal culture of the black community itself.
The Obama administration has made it possible to create petitions which, if they get sufficient signatures, will be
responded to and potentially acted on. I've created one at http://wh.gov/4PW which I encourage all to read and
sign if they agree with it. We can defeat this!
So Obama is by-passing the constitution yet again? Only Congress can bind the US to a treaty, not the President. (Though personally, I think Treaties should be required to pass Congress PLUS a Super Majority of the States.) Well, if Congress doesn't pass it, then there we can basically just ignore it.
I heard on NPR today that while 2% of the latest increases in health insurance costs could be attributed to the ACA, the other 98% of the increases were a combination of insurance companies pre-emptively raising rates in case health care costs went up further in the future, and actual increases in current health care costs that had nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act.
So to break it down:
2% of current increases are directly related to existing requirements that are presently in effect or close to being in effect per ACA
The remaining 98% splits into
preemptive increases as ACA limits the amount that rates can be raised on an annual basis
preemptive increases in anticipation of other requirements in ACA that are still a ways down the road but for which they cannot increase rates sufficiently to cover due to the previous point
non-related ACA increases
Too bad we can't get a better breakdown of those preemptive rate changes, because that would certainly point out the different ACA is already costing us. My guess is that the preemptive rate changes per ACA are likely to cover 90% or so of that rate changes.
It started out that way - but by the time Linus graduated in 1997, linux had become a huge thing, and I bet that if he hadn't made it the topic of his masters - he wouldn't have finished at all.
It started out as a method for Linus to access his work on the school Minix computers (source: Just for Fun). He later did use it as part of a Masters project for doing multi-architecture Operating systems, but that's it. It is mostly a development as a personal (prior to 1995, part-time/full-time without pay while he pursued academic degrees) and commercial (since 1995 when he's been paid to work full-time on it) project.
Besides why must Netflix negotiate with Dreamworks?
Because it is easiest to go to the central copyright holder for permissions. There are others you can license from, but only to the degree they're allowed to license. They also likely take a cut of the deals they make. Unfortunately this means dealing directly with a lot of different entities - which can be both expensive and time consuming. Some (like Disney) are hard to deal with (tried that myself).
Isn't there an MPAA
As another said, MPAA isn't a licensing authority. They're more like a union for motion picture companies - they provide racketeering services for everyone that pays their dues, and try to extort money for themselves for those that aren't (yet) paying dues.
Sadly and thankfully, there is no single organization one can go to do manage the licensing. While it would be convenient to have a single entity, it's be too monopolistic. As it is, groups like Right Stuf do exist, but then you get subjected to the gain/loss of whomever they have licensing authority for, and NetFlix is probably trying to avoid another issue like with Starz - which is similar to Right Stuf. They only way to get around that is to deal directly with the Studios yourself.
would having IT experience hurt my job prospects down the road?
Depends on the IT experience. If you do admin work, then yet it will generally get counted against you if you want to be programming. However, having an internship on various levels of a Help Desk can benefit you - especially if you like doing MMI/HCI stuff.
Would future employers see that and be less likely to hire me — or pigeon-hole me into IT?"
Sadly, employers tend to like to pidgeon hole people into what they have always done. This is not as big an issue when jumping between very different jobs - e.g. going from Accounting to HR. But it is a very big issue when trying to change tracks within a career - e.g. from Windows Programming to Linux Programming. So be careful what you take as it could be very hard to change later.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, quite spewing nonsense...
Yes, many sign non-compete contracts, and you can very well end up giving up rights to ideas, inventions, copyrights, etc. to you employer. However, many employers do not enforce them with few exceptions, and even those that do try have had issues. For example, look at the Mattel vs. Bratz lawsuit - the creator of Bratz use to work at Mattel creating Barbie dolls, so Mattel sued to try to shutdown Bratz - they lost.
I also know of a few people who despite having a family started a company, and I'm sure there are many many more. It's all a matter of having the will power and mindset to do so - to overcome the issues and achieve your goals whatever they may be.
Oh, and don't forget that even when a company does completely own what you work on, they may not be interested in it at all. The company I current work for was founded a result of such work. The founder developed the technology while working for another company; they were not interested in it, so he left and started a company around it - we're now top of the industry. Many have done similar with Microsoft and other big corporations, sometimes to get bought back later; though most go on their own separate path from the original company they "spawned" off of.
.Applies to every satellite State of Britain, former and current
current yes - so long as the State of Britain continues to recognize it; former, not necessarily. For example, while the US Constitution and laws may or may not have laws similar to Magna Carta 1297 Section 61, it does not actually recognize the Magna Carta 1297 as a binding legal document for the United States of America; thus. Magna Carta 1297 can say whatever it wants but it does not apply to the United States of America - this despite that the USA can be considered a former satellite state of Britain. and several other European countries (e.g. France, Portugal, Spain,..) as represented by the various colonies and settlements (the 13 colonies, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, California, etc.).
Please get your law right before posting.
Repeat after me, the first two words in one time pad are?
Your scheme can have a name, but it can't start, "one time" okay?
The original one-time pad is only ever used once - on the second message transmitted. This is a true one-time pad scheme, just applied with a slightly different data sourcing mechanism to allow both sides to communicate.
A 100% secure one-time pad does as slew suggests per a statistically provable fully random data source - but both sides have to have access to that same data source, or a synchronized version of it at the very least. This imposes a limit on the parties that can communicate using the one-time pad mechanism. That is, it can't replace SSL, Diffie-Hellman Key Exchanges, etc as those are typically used by two parties that may not be aware of each other until the session is created.
Conversely, my proposal would enable the use of a one-time pad scheme to replace SSL or a Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange, but as I noted it has its limits too so it is still not without fault but it might be good enough for some uses.
I don't think you understand the theory behind a one-time pad. Basically the one-time pad is unbreakable if the pad is not predictable (not that it is some arbitrary data stream) which usually requires it to be random. If you use some well-known text as a one time pad or a pad stream with non-uniform statistical properties (say attackable via english letter or word frequency analysis), then your one-time pad is not only theoretically breakable, in practice it's probably not very secure either.
For example, if you knew the pad-stream and the plain-text are both english text, you could xor the "encrypted" data with the 4 characters "space", ETAONRS (some of the most frequent letters), and try to recover likely characters and spaces. As we know, knowing the first and last letter of a word, some words are easy to figure out.
For a one-time pad cipher to be throretically unbreakable, the pad-stream must in practice be random (or created using an essentially random source).
True. As I said, it is not without its flaws, and it depends on its use. In some cases it may be good enough - but there are certainly limits to what I proposed (which I acknowledged in the proposal) for the security to remain sufficient.
You are proposing:
In correct. I am proposing:
The difference is you are using the unencrypted text to make the next encryption. Otherwise yes you are correct.
And I do agree there is a vulnerability there, but don't necessarily agree that it is easy to tease out unless you are able to capture the first message - P(0).
A one time pad allows you to encrypt one bit of plaintext per bit of key. If you use that plaintext to communicate a new key, you gain precisely nothing.
You're not quite following what I am suggesting, which is along the following:
The only big issue with the above is when the message being sent is larger than the message received. However, that could be resolved by buffering the old messages and only tossing away the data as it is used for the one-time pad, so if the message is sufficiently larger than the few messages after it it may be a few messages before those messages are used in the one-time pad. Of course, you will have a problem if there is not enough data to properly apply a one-time pad to the larger message, but that could be managed by the protocol - e.g. generate a message that sends back a dummy message to get additional data for more one-time pads to have sufficient information. This also means that any two parties would be essentially making new key-exchanges with each message set sent/received.
Now of course, the main security issue is that the entire one-time pad is in the data stream itself. Intercept the data stream and you could have sufficient information to decode it if you knew how the protocol worked and buffered enough of it to decode the one-time pads. Depending on the use, it may be just as secure as a true one-time pad if all messages were equally sized so that you had to get the initial message to really be able to decode anything.
So, I am not saying it is not without fault but that depending on use, it may be good enough.
Now, to your comment, you don't really seem to understand a true one-time pad. The algorithm is rather simple - is just an XOR of bytes over the message. The hard part is the data source. In a true one-time pad all parties wishing to communicate have access to the same exact data source and know where the other is going to operate within that data source to encode the information. This is truly secure - unbreakable - so long as you do not repeat over the same data set.
That is, a one-time pad is secure as long as the source for the one-time pad is never reused. Think of a file of random data. You share the file with the other party and you both exchange data using a known offset into the file. If you both start at the start of the file then as long as you never wrap around to the start of the file you have a secure means of communication that cannot be broken. If you start to wrap around the file, so you start repeating the use of the data used for the one-time pad then the source information can eventually be decoded from the data stream by pattern recognition techniques thus defeating the security of the one-time pad. This is resolved by simply using a file that is large enough to never be wrapped by the data you communicate. Such methods are used by the NSA and CIA and others to securely communicate information with a guarantee that no-one else can intercept and decode the data.
Now back to my proposal - the source of the one-time pad becomes the data stream itself. This has a slight fault in that the source is available, but if properly utilized may be just as secure. The primary vulnerability is receipt of the first message since the second message would use it to pad itself when responding.
Also, you don't typically use a one-time pad to communicate something to setup a key-exchange for Diffie-Hellman or RSA. They have their own protocol already for doing the key exchange. In the case of Diffie-Hellman, you send the public information of your key and get back the public information for the other party's key. You then both use your own private key with the o
This doesn't help with one of the most common uses of asymmetric keys, which is secure initial key exchange...
You could probably build the one-time pad into the initial message and then use the data stream itself to continue the one-time pad on. It does leave you vulnerable to anyone that receives that initial message, but would probably be otherwise unbreakable unless you start repeating a lot of data in the data stream - but then, even a true one time pad would then be vulnerable too.
LFS has only one use - teaching you how to build a distribution should you want to be the next Red Hat, SuSe, Gentoo, etc. It does not belong any where near a real Linux installation - server OR desktop.
Do you have any reasons why "it does not belong any where near a real Linux installation"? Gentoo is, perhaps, even worse than an Ubuntu distribution in many circumstances. Unless you really know what you are doing, you're very likely to break things on a Gentoo distro.
To start with, LFS's goal is NOT to be a real Linux installation. It's stated goal is to teach you how to build a distribution so that you may then go off and do so (http://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/); even if you derive it from LFS. However, please note how few distributions are derived from LFS.
If you won't want to use Gentoo, then use Slackware and install everything from source yourself. That's the only thing better than using Gentoo. And even LFS is sissified in comparison.
Also I'm betting you've never installed LFS. If you know what you are doing, you have almost ultimate control over your system with LFS. I'm betting the reason most people don't run it as a server is because it would be way too much effort to learn how to build an entire operating system just to run a server. Oh and let me know if you can think of a reason why it's "sissified".
I've gone through LFS before, and it's rather cumbersome. You also don't need most of their patches, which at least at the time I did they claimed were required to make a distribution system, but really you didn't - I used vanilla sources just fine.
People don't use LFS for a server or desktop because there is no real process for keeping it up to date, getting security fixes, etc. It's entirely up to you to do the work. And every now and again they release a new copy of the documentation for building the whole thing over with new patches, updated software, etc - but no migration from an older build. You're on your own.
So really, you're no better off than doing Slackware and then building all your own software from source - at least then, you have the advantage of using PkgTool when you want to install something from Slackware instead of rolling your own. (Though you could do that under LFS too, but it's much quicker to just start with Slackware instead of LFS.)
But honestly, if you really want to get 100% out of your system configuration and run a system built from source, then there is nothing like Gentoo which makes it extremely easy to do, complete with updates, security patches, and a full set of methods to keep a consistent system build going as well as a lot larger community to help out in the rare instances you do actually run into trouble. And yes, Gentoo is used on many servers too - even allowing you to build on a non-production system to make rolling out to production systems very easy (emerge package && quickpkg package, transfer to the other computer, and emerge the prebuilt package).
Gentoo is for sissies who like having their hands held and bottoms wiped. Real men - you know, the kind with beards and repulsive body odor - use Linux From Scratch.
LFS has only one use - teaching you how to build a distribution should you want to be the next Red Hat, SuSe, Gentoo, etc. It does not belong any where near a real Linux installation - server OR desktop.
If you won't want to use Gentoo, then use Slackware and install everything from source yourself. That's the only thing better than using Gentoo. And even LFS is sissified in comparison.
So that's why they broke the system in 11.10 by moving /var/run to /run and /var/lock to /run/lock...
(Italics added)
The question he is posing is only part of the question that he is claiming has been asked and is incorrect. That is, if software itself is not patentable, then the natural result is that something that is patentable in hardware is not patentable when implemented solely in software; however, the versus is not true - if you deem that anything implemented in hardware is patentable but its software implementation is not, then that does not mean that all software is not patentable.
This only goes to show that the software industry has been asking the right question by first asking whether software - any software - is patentable first and foremost.
However, even changing the argument as he wants still renders a flawed analysis. Why? Because as others here have pointed out the patent on the hardware implementation is not simply the function of the hardware implementation but the entirety of the implementation itself - the layout, the components, the interconnects, the materials, the dimensions, and the function; where as a software patent is simply the function - anything else it the mathematic model to produce the function - but that is not enough to make something patentable as it is by nature abstract and (per SCOTUS) non-patentable.
Well, it doesn't reach 1:1 mostly because you'll get some that are defective in some manner no matter what you do. So the stores return those and replace them with another from their stock. You might even get someone picking up a phone at one store and having it swapped out at another store, though that will vary by what the carriers allow the associated stores to do. So, it's probably more like 100:99 than 1:1 in the end, but it all comes down to the QA each company has - both the phone provider and the stores themselves. And obviously they want to get as close to that 1:1 ratio as they can.
Now that's just the worker - no computer, office space, etc.
Now I worked for one of the big DoD contractors a few years back. Between me and the corporate officers were about 7 layers of management and business units (just to the Sector level of the company; the company also had a corporate sector that oversaw all of the sectors, of which I have no idea how many levels there were - but we'll assume at least 2 levels) - so that's 9 levels of management that they would account for - so $35+ 9*$5 + 9*$5 + $5 for $130/hr for someone at even a relatively low "grade" level - i.e. it only goes up from there.
Now, I don't know the exact numbers for the above, so it may work out a little differently but it basically does add up that way.
There is an easy fix for this. Make patents non-transferable. Whomever invents something can claim a patent on the invention and reap the benefits for a limited time. Once the inventor dies, or the company folds or gets bought, the invention becomes public domain.
The real problem is that patents or no longer a means, they are the end.
Agreed that patents should be non-transferrable.
However, there is also another solution - define the patent life-time by the time it takes to recoupe investment + a given percentage of profit (less that 50%, probably 10-20% of the investment), and have a branch of the USPTO be setup to review business plans both with patent applications (does it meet the criteria; is the time-line reasonable; is the price reasonable; etc.) and with granted patents (performance progress). Some things that may be patentable will payoff quickly (investment+profit) before the patent could be granted and thereby it would quickly enter into the public domain; however, things that are not of much interest to the world may take a long time to payoff and have a longer life. The cost of the bureaucracy to support this is simply the cost of supporting patents, and it would let the markets truly decide the life of the patent grant on a per-patent, per-industry, etc. basis. Sadly, the entrenched players will not let it happen since most patents would probably pay out before a grant would/could be given, and many things (like software) would simply not be worth it to patent as a result - an automatic check & balance in the approach.
What you would do is get access points for your business from large companies then counter sue them. They made the purportedly infringing devices and you bought it from them. It's their problem. If Cisco and Motorola as were mentioned in the story as going to court on this got thousands of lawsuits each, there would be some urgency on their part.
Or rather, when they file against you, you just file that they need to be suing the manufacturer instead, and you request the manufacturer to stand in. The court should recognize it especially if the manufacturer decides to step up. If they don't, then you threaten to remove their equipment and replace it with a competitors that will stand up. If none do, then you remove the technology and file accordingly. (That won't absolve the complaint but it will help shut things down.)
If enough people do that, then the manufacturers will be forced to step in. But you have to get people to do that to start with instead of just settling. What is surprising it that the various companies in-house counsel or outside counsel are not advising them to do so.
Okay, so you add software culpability laws. But where do you draw the line of culpability?
.Net, Gtk, etc - to build upon. Is the application provided culpable for the bugs in the toolkits? Or do they simply say "that's a toolkit bug" so the user has to go after the toolkit vendor directly? or are we going to end up with a fantastically lawsuit encouraging environment where the user goes after the application developer who has to turn around and go after the toolkit vendor who...
Most software uses a toolkit of some sort - WxWidgets, Qt, MFC,
And of course, then you get into the hard-to-replicate bugs. What kind of bug is allowed to be sued for? One that occurs once but kills all the data? Or must it be repeatable? For that matter, how to you certify that the bug is indeed in the application and not in the hardware? Or even which application it is in?
For example, Compaq had a big bug in their Floppy Controllers years back that would randomly cause the floppy to not write data to disk. They later settled. But how would you prove that the bug was not in say Microsoft Windows or Linux and that it was indeed in the Floppy Controller? And who would the user have to go after? Would they have to go after the application vendor, who would go after the OS vendor, who would go after the hardware vendor?
Furthermore, how do you define that it is a bug? Do you specify a reference platform? Can each vendor specify a separate reference platform or does the law specify the platform? If the law, how does innovation in the platforms occur without the reference platform becoming obsolete? How does the vendor, how to does the user stand to win anything if their system doesn't match the reference platform? Either way, it's self-defeating.
Where does it end?
The problem with software, as compared to the rest of the world (and even computer hardware), is that the rules are all off when changing environments and nearly every computer is different from every other computer. Take two computers with Windows installed - even the same version of Windows - and you'll likely have them installed to different patch levels or have different device drivers - even if you bought both at the same time from the same place and bought the same models; and if you didn't 100% lock it down directly after the purchase before any user got on it, then there is likely different software installed too, so they quickly diverge to become different environments.
No other industry has that kind of change in environment for their products. In some respects its amazing that software manages to work at all given all the changes between when developers make the software and when the user actually uses the software the developers released on their computer.
And it happened to blacks to a greater extent because poverty was more prevalent in the black community. To a middle-class person living on welfare is a huge step down from what they're used to. If you grew up in poverty, however, living in poverty for free beats the crap out of working your ass off to live in poverty.
Not really. The growth of the middle class has mostly been due to the various movements since the 1920's. Prior to the entry of the unions, most would still have been considered near poverty levels. So it's not a matter of how many were in poverty, but how the community responds to circumstances that lead to or away from generational poverty. The European and Asian descendant communities don't have that problem. And you can't blame in on slavery either - which equally affected the European descendant communities for nearly as long. There were also a lot of European descendants that knew poverty from the Great Depression too, but it only drove them to do better not live off the state for the most part.
Prior to this whole welfare system being setup the black communities did pretty well, and like the white communities had a sense of pride in doing good work for good money. Yes, there was a racial disadvantage but they didn't let that stop them.
And while the Civil Rights Movement on the whole was a good thing, it also had an unintended consequence when combined with welfare and African Heritages Moment that ended up destroying that aforementioned sense of pride, which has resulted into today's ever increasingly impoverished black community that doesn't take so much pride in doing good work for a good money, but denigrates itself into much worse status than was afforded even before the Civil Rights Movement and potentially even before the Emancipation Proclamation.
While there is a substantial issue with poverty and cyclic jail terms for the black community, nothing is more damaging in terms of breaking the cycle to the black community than its own members putting each other down for trying to do better academically. This has nothing to do with slavery, or anything else other than internal racism by the black community.
Interesting that you mention that, as that has little to do with lingering effects of slavery, and more to do with the design of the welfare system which back in the 1960's-1980's helped destroy the basic family unit in black communities when families could get more from welfare for a single mom with children than they could if dad was home too. Thus divorce rates went up so that the family could get more entitlements from the state.
So why didn't that happen to the white community? I mean, aside from the impoverished portion of the white community to which it did happen.
Happened there too - just far more prevalent in the black community.
I'm personally not buying the whole "Global Warming" bit, and I felt Al Gore's film was based primarily on FUD and Guilt (there were parts such as the little "story" about his child... irrelevant) and known-massaged numbers. Before somebody jumps up and down and screams "denier" or some other goofy label - let's be clear that I think there is some "Global Climate Change" going on, which we may or may not contributing to. The evidence has been shown both ways, and honestly I'm having a REALLY hard time believing either side considering all the bogus political grandstanding they've both had. It's time to remove the vested interests and get some real science done to figure out if we're gonna cook, cool, or just have to do this thing we've been doing for a few thousand years called Adapt. That's my two hopefully unbiased cents.
Agreed, though I think it will be a long time (likely centuries) really before we really have an answer. In the mean-time, we'll be figuring out the various cyclic events - we've generally understood the 10-year cycles, but don't have any real grasp on the 50, 100, or greater cycles. (And no, looking a core samples from trees and ice, etc are not going to give you the information you need to determine those cycles as there is a lot more information required than will be able to be retrieved from those kinds of data points however interesting they may be.)
It's not so much about the past slavery, segregation, etc., but rather the institutionalized poverty that came with it that still lingers. Unfortunately it has become a feedback loop, which doesn't help anyone.
Interesting that you mention that, as that has little to do with lingering effects of slavery, and more to do with the design of the welfare system which back in the 1960's-1980's helped destroy the basic family unit in black communities when families could get more from welfare for a single mom with children than they could if dad was home too. Thus divorce rates went up so that the family could get more entitlements from the state.
This in turn yielded families without father figures, which then pushed more children into street gangs, and started what is now a hard-to-break cycle (especially) for black males of prison terms - rotating between gang life, fathering children, and prison. Again, leaving the mothers home with the children, and also not entering marriages nearly as often. Some try to encourage their children not to follow their own footsteps, but since they're in prison (and sometimes mom too) there is no one home long enough to prevent it, and the cycle continues.
Add to that the intra-black community racism where they encourage each other not to do as well as they could in school as they would otherwise be "too white" in the eyes of their peers, and it only further breaks it all down, and suppresses the income levels for those students in the long term.
All of the above is well documented in numerous news coverages throughout the years, and is the #1 reason for the poverty rates in the black communities. It has absolutely zero to do with segregation, slavery, racism by non-black people, etc; and everything to do with the internal culture of the black community itself.
The Obama administration has made it possible to create petitions which, if they get sufficient signatures, will be responded to and potentially acted on. I've created one at http://wh.gov/4PW which I encourage all to read and sign if they agree with it. We can defeat this!
So Obama is by-passing the constitution yet again? Only Congress can bind the US to a treaty, not the President. (Though personally, I think Treaties should be required to pass Congress PLUS a Super Majority of the States.) Well, if Congress doesn't pass it, then there we can basically just ignore it.
I heard on NPR today that while 2% of the latest increases in health insurance costs could be attributed to the ACA, the other 98% of the increases were a combination of insurance companies pre-emptively raising rates in case health care costs went up further in the future, and actual increases in current health care costs that had nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act.
So to break it down:
Too bad we can't get a better breakdown of those preemptive rate changes, because that would certainly point out the different ACA is already costing us. My guess is that the preemptive rate changes per ACA are likely to cover 90% or so of that rate changes.
It started out that way - but by the time Linus graduated in 1997, linux had become a huge thing, and I bet that if he hadn't made it the topic of his masters - he wouldn't have finished at all.
It started out as a method for Linus to access his work on the school Minix computers (source: Just for Fun). He later did use it as part of a Masters project for doing multi-architecture Operating systems, but that's it. It is mostly a development as a personal (prior to 1995, part-time/full-time without pay while he pursued academic degrees) and commercial (since 1995 when he's been paid to work full-time on it) project.
Besides why must Netflix negotiate with Dreamworks?
Because it is easiest to go to the central copyright holder for permissions. There are others you can license from, but only to the degree they're allowed to license. They also likely take a cut of the deals they make. Unfortunately this means dealing directly with a lot of different entities - which can be both expensive and time consuming. Some (like Disney) are hard to deal with (tried that myself).
Isn't there an MPAA
As another said, MPAA isn't a licensing authority. They're more like a union for motion picture companies - they provide racketeering services for everyone that pays their dues, and try to extort money for themselves for those that aren't (yet) paying dues.
Sadly and thankfully, there is no single organization one can go to do manage the licensing. While it would be convenient to have a single entity, it's be too monopolistic. As it is, groups like Right Stuf do exist, but then you get subjected to the gain/loss of whomever they have licensing authority for, and NetFlix is probably trying to avoid another issue like with Starz - which is similar to Right Stuf. They only way to get around that is to deal directly with the Studios yourself.
would having IT experience hurt my job prospects down the road?
Depends on the IT experience. If you do admin work, then yet it will generally get counted against you if you want to be programming. However, having an internship on various levels of a Help Desk can benefit you - especially if you like doing MMI/HCI stuff.
Would future employers see that and be less likely to hire me — or pigeon-hole me into IT?"
Sadly, employers tend to like to pidgeon hole people into what they have always done. This is not as big an issue when jumping between very different jobs - e.g. going from Accounting to HR. But it is a very big issue when trying to change tracks within a career - e.g. from Windows Programming to Linux Programming. So be careful what you take as it could be very hard to change later.