Sounds like a great opportunity for a denial-of-service attack. The terrorists want to blow up ALL OF LONDON!!! so they take 50 or so cell-phones, download custom ringtones made of people yelling at each other and then tape them up near the cameras in various innocuous locations around town.
Then, when they want to do something nefarious in a place that happens to be in front of some cameras, they just have someone call a bunch of the phones and all the camera monitoring people will focus their attention elsewhere.
Kind of like starting a fire on one side of town right before you go to rob a bank on the other side.
Sorry, but I happen to think that's crap. Much like the government, whenever a controversial law/license is proposed, and its supporters, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would never be applied in that way' - they're LYING. They intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible.
I'd venture that this is true not just of software patents, but in software, the progress made in the absence of a patent regime for so many years spoke volumes about the lack of a need for patent protection.
Give this AC the whole EFFing bakery. Finally, someone who actually understands the effects of software patents in the real world.
In the "copyright debate" there is lots of arguing back and forth about the necessity of copyrights to encourage the "progress of science the useful arts." But it is all just a bunch of postulating.
Here we have demonstrable proof that software patents are not necessary because the whole shebang is only about a decade old, and their creation has not done anything to markedly improve the situation. If anything, it has been the reverse with proprietary software stagnating and consolidating into a handful of big corps like MS and Oracle. All the really innovative stuff is happening in the Free world which is antithetical to the idea of software patents.
You might find the history of the company that is now called Cray to be interesting. They used to be called TERA before they bought the remains of Cray from SGI. TERA had a CPU that did something like a thread context switch on every memory access and had no data or instruction cache either. I think they called MTA for multi-threaded architecture.
There is total immunity and then there is developing a tolerance. I'm not talking about becoming invulnerable to all taser attacks, I am talking about coping with them better than the average untrained person. Things like 'teaching' your body to recover from the effects more quickly - for the neurons to "settle" more quickly after a random firing. Maybe teaching your body to put out stronger impulses so as to override the disruptive effect of the taser.
Of course this is slashdot so some AC will come along and make a smart-ass comment about running your neurons at megawatt levels as if that invalidates the theory.
If you could stand up after being Tased they wouldn't be using them in the first place.
Does anyone know how easy it is to develop a 'tolerance' for tasing?
If you shock yourself enough times, starting off at low levels and gradually increasing them, can you build up a sort of resistance (no pun intended) to the effect? Maybe not to the point of full immunity, but perhaps a stronger than normal ability to compensate for the disruption is causes to the nervous system and perhaps 'route around' the incapacitated nerves with other nerves until they recover?
What's up with all the sheeple standing around watching? It's shameful that such a large crowd was too timid to stop the police from doing something so obviously wrong. What exactly would it take to get the crowd to intervene?
That is normal human behaviour. What happens with a group is that everybody is waiting for someone else to 'do something' but since everybody is waiting, nobody actually does something. There is a famous case of a woman being murdered in plain sight in a neighborhood one night, screaming bloody murder and waking up most of the people on the street. Yet no one did a thing to save her, they did not even call the police, much less chase off her attacker.
That is an important lesson to keep in mind in any emergency situation.
The most useless thing you can do is yell out "someone call a doctor" to a group - no one will do anything. In situations like that, what works is to pick someone, let them know that they have been chosen and that it is their responsibility to see the task through - something like, "You there!" (pointing directly at the person you have chosen) "Call 911 and get an ambulance here immediately!"
How can you "upconvert" 2D images to 3D when there is no 3D information to work with, hm?
"Smart" algorithms can make some pretty good guesses based on the same kind of information that the mpeg compression algorithms use to create motion vectors. Yes, the motion vectors in mpeg are 2D in the plane of the screen, but add in some smarts to recognize "objects" that get bigger (approaching) and smaller (receding) and you've got enough info to do some pseudo 3D. If you can recognize rotation then you can do some really nice fake-3D.
the term "common law principles" has a specific legal meaning - it refers to the historical body of law inherited from British law as practised before the creation of the states.
Searching a database of pictures which were collected under the premise of a different use seems like an unreasonable search of my papers or if 'papers' is considered narrowly as actual paper, my effects.
I mean, if they can spend $1.6b on Youtube, what's $200m?
Well, for one that $1.6B was not actual cash, it was all restricted shares. I don't know the specifics off-hand, but typically such deals stipulate that few if any shares can be sold for about a year and even then they are only released bit by bit over the next few years.
That doesn't mean the youtube founders can't immediately cash in, there is a whole banking subindustry similar to the "tax refund loan" business where a bank will loan you money (at a healthy rate of interest) with your locked-up shares as collateral.
"If you can read the chip, then you can clone it," he says. "You could use this to clone a passport that would exploit the system to illegally enter another country."
Don't see how you can
Which part are you disputing?
The, "if you can read it you can clone it" part? Or the, "you could use a cloned passport to exploit the system" part?
I think the first is obviously true.
I think the second only requires a small amount of imagination - clone a passport of someone who looks similar to you and you are good to go, especially since the customs agents will inevitably start relying on the computer to validate people rather than their own judgement.
Right now, there are many projects that I have on the burners. They are on the burners only because I am driven to do them. Some people climb mountains - others code software. Don't ask why - the reason is the same.
Some people climb mountains because they are there. Some people write Free software because it is not there.
Had Mexico or Quebec been the first region to throw off it's colonial power, those people would likely be referred to as "Americans" on the international stage.
Baloney.
It's not the Canadian Republic of America, nor is it the United Mexican States of America. The reason citizens of the USA are commonly referred to as American is because the 'A' in USA stands for America. It is shorthand. But it is hardly uniquely restricted to the USA.
Nation of origin and citizenship are not the only criteria for the naming of ethnic and geographic groups - else only Chinese would be Asians and only Egyptians would be Africans, only Scotts would be Celts, only Georgians would be Caucasians, etc.
Personally, I don't develop software just so that I can be an anonymous contributor to future technology. I do it to pay the rent, buy cars, etc.
What am I missing here? (And I'm not being sarcastic with that, I genuinely don't understand why anyone would want to share the fundamentals of their creation in a way that would compromise any potential future earnings.)
Because the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts.
The vast majority of people who write free software ARE compensated. Lots of students do it for the educational value (for example, Mosaic the proto-netscape, was written by undergrads and graduate students at NCSA). Lots of software developers do it in support of their daily job - for example, the guy who writes a module for Apache because his employer's website needs that functionality, or the guy who writes perl because he needs a better way to process log files at NASA, etc. Or they are paid specifically to work on it, like the hundreds of developers at IBM and HP and Redhat.
Most developers of Free software realize they have the choice of starting from scratch and reinventing the wheel, or standing on the shoulders of the people who have gone before them and getting the results they need so much faster with a much higher level of quality. Since their jobs aren't about monetizing software creation, there is little to no upside to starting from scratch.
While the "altrustic" streak is there, just like it is in the proprietary software world (look at all the people who spend man-months of their life giving out free support for proprietary software users on various web forums) Free software as an economic model is solidly based on the self-interest of the developers who use it to as a tool, not an end unto itself.
If companies can come in and use open source components in their own creation in a way that they make money without violating licenses, but at the same time aren't obligated to give anything back to the community, where's the motivation for new developers to go open source?
The GPL prevents that. Any improvements that are distributed beyond the improver him/it-self must effectively be made available to the community in general. Other licenses, like the BSDs do not protect against that sort of free-rider problem. (Which is one reason MS is so very anti-GPL, but pees a little every time they talk about the BSD license).
The coup was obviously undemocratic, but Thailand is now actually in a far better situation than under the previous regime.
I don't live there, but I have friends who are in the royal family (it is a big family) and that's the impression I get too. The guy who was ousted appeared to have gone a little too far in indulging in american-style government/corporate bogus-free-market kleptocracy (the "socialize the costs, privatize the profits" kind where he and his family were majority shareholders).
Thai, but otherwise unrelated, I just saw Citizen Dog and loved it. Along with Bangkok Loco and Shutter the Thai film market has been showing some real potential. I hope this "regime change" will continue with the economic circumstances that have encouraged recent local film production.
There is at least one huge mitigating factor to Dr Drew - all the callers are self-selecting.
So, while he is pretty good at picking out the people with a history of varying degrees of abuse, it doesn't say all that much about the population in general. When the only people who call in are the ones with problems, it isn't that hard to guess that the, surprise, the caller has a problem and surprise, it is probably related to the reason they are calling.
While it is certainly more complicated than this, Dr Drew would have just about as high a success rate if he asked each caller if they were regular milk drinkers as children as he does asking if they were abused.
You can't make accurate judgments about the general population by only looking at the extremes.
In honor of Vespucci's discovery of the new forth portion of the world, Waldseemuller printed a wood block map (called "Carta Mariana") with the name "America" spread across the southern continent of the New World.
The term American originally referred to the first nation in North or South America that was non-aboriginal. That nation of course is formed by the United States of America.
What a load of Bullshit. Next time, could you do you an iota of research before posting your facts?
The continents were named after Amerigo Vespucci who first landed at the mouth of the Amazon in 1499 and was the first explorer to realize that he was not in India but rather a new place.
The Tragedy of the Commons defeats this argument. If I'm the private owner, why should I spend my money to preserve it when I could make money be selling the land to a clear-cutter?
1) Because, as the owner of the land with a vested interest in the land, it is more valuable to you forested (an ongoing resource) than clear-cut (a one-time use). Sure there will be plenty of times when the owner decideds that partial clear-cutting is his ownly choice due to short-term economic problems. But, private ownership is meant to be the least wasteful model, not a utopian (in the classic sense) model.
This article is de facto proof that private ownership of the forest by those with a vested interest in the forest (the native indians) will work.
2) You are trying to use the tragedy of the commons to try to justify the commons (communal ownership of the forest) as the best economic model. Very ironic.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like a great opportunity for a denial-of-service attack. The terrorists want to blow up ALL OF LONDON!!! so they take 50 or so cell-phones, download custom ringtones made of people yelling at each other and then tape them up near the cameras in various innocuous locations around town.
Then, when they want to do something nefarious in a place that happens to be in front of some cameras, they just have someone call a bunch of the phones and all the camera monitoring people will focus their attention elsewhere.
Kind of like starting a fire on one side of town right before you go to rob a bank on the other side.
Looks like DRM was made for you, to prevent the unauthorized copying of other people's work!
Apple made black Apple II's back in the 1970s. I don't think SGI was around then.
They may also be kicked around, like soccer balls, a popular sport in 99.9 percent of the world.
If you thought curling was a strange sport, get ready for laptop soccer!
All the kids are doing it, well 99.9% of them at least!
I'd venture that this is true not just of software patents, but in software, the progress made in the absence of a patent regime for so many years spoke volumes about the lack of a need for patent protection.
Give this AC the whole EFFing bakery. Finally, someone who actually understands the effects of software patents in the real world.
In the "copyright debate" there is lots of arguing back and forth about the necessity of copyrights to encourage the "progress of science the useful arts." But it is all just a bunch of postulating.
Here we have demonstrable proof that software patents are not necessary because the whole shebang is only about a decade old, and their creation has not done anything to markedly improve the situation. If anything, it has been the reverse with proprietary software stagnating and consolidating into a handful of big corps like MS and Oracle. All the really innovative stuff is happening in the Free world which is antithetical to the idea of software patents.
Looks like this time they got themselves a much sexier name than MTA - Threadstorm.
Anybody saying "Eurabia" should be forced into the body of a Palestinian in Israel about to get killed by an Israeli tank.
Orally? Or perhaps through the palestinian's belly button?
You might find the history of the company that is now called Cray to be interesting. They used to be called TERA before they bought the remains of Cray from SGI. TERA had a CPU that did something like a thread context switch on every memory access and had no data or instruction cache either. I think they called MTA for multi-threaded architecture.
There is total immunity and then there is developing a tolerance. I'm not talking about becoming invulnerable to all taser attacks, I am talking about coping with them better than the average untrained person. Things like 'teaching' your body to recover from the effects more quickly - for the neurons to "settle" more quickly after a random firing. Maybe teaching your body to put out stronger impulses so as to override the disruptive effect of the taser.
Of course this is slashdot so some AC will come along and make a smart-ass comment about running your neurons at megawatt levels as if that invalidates the theory.
If you could stand up after being Tased they wouldn't be using them in the first place.
Does anyone know how easy it is to develop a 'tolerance' for tasing?
If you shock yourself enough times, starting off at low levels and gradually increasing them, can you build up a sort of resistance (no pun intended) to the effect? Maybe not to the point of full immunity, but perhaps a stronger than normal ability to compensate for the disruption is causes to the nervous system and perhaps 'route around' the incapacitated nerves with other nerves until they recover?
What's up with all the sheeple standing around watching? It's shameful that such a large crowd was too timid to stop the police from doing something so obviously wrong. What exactly would it take to get the crowd to intervene?
That is normal human behaviour. What happens with a group is that everybody is waiting for someone else to 'do something' but since everybody is waiting, nobody actually does something. There is a famous case of a woman being murdered in plain sight in a neighborhood one night, screaming bloody murder and waking up most of the people on the street. Yet no one did a thing to save her, they did not even call the police, much less chase off her attacker.
That is an important lesson to keep in mind in any emergency situation.
The most useless thing you can do is yell out "someone call a doctor" to a group - no one will do anything. In situations like that, what works is to pick someone, let them know that they have been chosen and that it is their responsibility to see the task through - something like, "You there!" (pointing directly at the person you have chosen) "Call 911 and get an ambulance here immediately!"
How can you "upconvert" 2D images to 3D when there is no 3D information to work with, hm?
"Smart" algorithms can make some pretty good guesses based on the same kind of information that the mpeg compression algorithms use to create motion vectors. Yes, the motion vectors in mpeg are 2D in the plane of the screen, but add in some smarts to recognize "objects" that get bigger (approaching) and smaller (receding) and you've got enough info to do some pseudo 3D. If you can recognize rotation then you can do some really nice fake-3D.
Neither disagreeing or agreeing with you, but:
the term "common law principles" has a specific legal meaning - it refers to the historical body of law inherited from British law as practised before the creation of the states.
could someone go and renew their license yet refuse to have their picture taken citing the 5th amendment.
Forget the 5th amendment, I think this ought to be considered a direct violation of the 4th amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...
Searching a database of pictures which were collected under the premise of a different use seems like an unreasonable search of my papers or if 'papers' is considered narrowly as actual paper, my effects.
I mean, if they can spend $1.6b on Youtube, what's $200m?
Well, for one that $1.6B was not actual cash, it was all restricted shares. I don't know the specifics off-hand, but typically such deals stipulate that few if any shares can be sold for about a year and even then they are only released bit by bit over the next few years.
That doesn't mean the youtube founders can't immediately cash in, there is a whole banking subindustry similar to the "tax refund loan" business where a bank will loan you money (at a healthy rate of interest) with your locked-up shares as collateral.
The, "if you can read it you can clone it" part?
Or the, "you could use a cloned passport to exploit the system" part?
I think the first is obviously true.
I think the second only requires a small amount of imagination - clone a passport of someone who looks similar to you and you are good to go, especially since the customs agents will inevitably start relying on the computer to validate people rather than their own judgement.
Right now, there are many projects that I have on the burners. They are on the burners only because I am driven to do them. Some people climb mountains - others code software. Don't ask why - the reason is the same.
Some people climb mountains because they are there.
Some people write Free software because it is not there.
Had Mexico or Quebec been the first region to throw off it's colonial power, those people would likely be referred to as "Americans" on the international stage.
Baloney.
It's not the Canadian Republic of America, nor is it the United Mexican States of America. The reason citizens of the USA are commonly referred to as American is because the 'A' in USA stands for America. It is shorthand. But it is hardly uniquely restricted to the USA.
Nation of origin and citizenship are not the only criteria for the naming of ethnic and geographic groups - else only Chinese would be Asians and only Egyptians would be Africans, only Scotts would be Celts, only Georgians would be Caucasians, etc.
There were Americans long before there was a USA.
Personally, I don't develop software just so that I can be an anonymous contributor to future technology. I do it to pay the rent, buy cars, etc.
What am I missing here? (And I'm not being sarcastic with that, I genuinely don't understand why anyone would want to share the fundamentals of their creation in a way that would compromise any potential future earnings.)
Because the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts.
The vast majority of people who write free software ARE compensated. Lots of students do it for the educational value (for example, Mosaic the proto-netscape, was written by undergrads and graduate students at NCSA). Lots of software developers do it in support of their daily job - for example, the guy who writes a module for Apache because his employer's website needs that functionality, or the guy who writes perl because he needs a better way to process log files at NASA, etc. Or they are paid specifically to work on it, like the hundreds of developers at IBM and HP and Redhat.
Most developers of Free software realize they have the choice of starting from scratch and reinventing the wheel, or standing on the shoulders of the people who have gone before them and getting the results they need so much faster with a much higher level of quality. Since their jobs aren't about monetizing software creation, there is little to no upside to starting from scratch.
While the "altrustic" streak is there, just like it is in the proprietary software world (look at all the people who spend man-months of their life giving out free support for proprietary software users on various web forums) Free software as an economic model is solidly based on the self-interest of the developers who use it to as a tool, not an end unto itself.
If companies can come in and use open source components in their own creation in a way that they make money without violating licenses, but at the same time aren't obligated to give anything back to the community, where's the motivation for new developers to go open source?
The GPL prevents that. Any improvements that are distributed beyond the improver him/it-self must effectively be made available to the community in general. Other licenses, like the BSDs do not protect against that sort of free-rider problem. (Which is one reason MS is so very anti-GPL, but pees a little every time they talk about the BSD license).
The coup was obviously undemocratic, but Thailand is now actually in a far better situation than under the previous regime.
I don't live there, but I have friends who are in the royal family (it is a big family) and that's the impression I get too. The guy who was ousted appeared to have gone a little too far in indulging in american-style government/corporate bogus-free-market kleptocracy (the "socialize the costs, privatize the profits" kind where he and his family were majority shareholders).
Thai, but otherwise unrelated, I just saw Citizen Dog and loved it. Along with Bangkok Loco and Shutter the Thai film market has been showing some real potential. I hope this "regime change" will continue with the economic circumstances that have encouraged recent local film production.
There is at least one huge mitigating factor to Dr Drew - all the callers are self-selecting.
So, while he is pretty good at picking out the people with a history of varying degrees of abuse, it doesn't say all that much about the population in general. When the only people who call in are the ones with problems, it isn't that hard to guess that the, surprise, the caller has a problem and surprise, it is probably related to the reason they are calling.
While it is certainly more complicated than this, Dr Drew would have just about as high a success rate if he asked each caller if they were regular milk drinkers as children as he does asking if they were abused.
You can't make accurate judgments about the general population by only looking at the extremes.
What part of "The term American originally referred to the first nation..." do you fail to understand as being incorrect?
The 'first' part?
The 'nation' part?
The point is that long before there was a USA there were Americans.
Read the the link dumbass.
The term American originally referred to the first nation in North or South America that was non-aboriginal. That nation of course is formed by the United States of America.
What a load of Bullshit. Next time, could you do you an iota of research before posting your facts?
The continents were named after Amerigo Vespucci who first landed at the mouth of the Amazon in 1499 and was the first explorer to realize that he was not in India but rather a new place.
The Tragedy of the Commons defeats this argument. If I'm the private owner, why should I spend my money to preserve it when I could make money be selling the land to a clear-cutter?
1) Because, as the owner of the land with a vested interest in the land, it is more valuable to you forested (an ongoing resource) than clear-cut (a one-time use). Sure there will be plenty of times when the owner decideds that partial clear-cutting is his ownly choice due to short-term economic problems. But, private ownership is meant to be the least wasteful model, not a utopian (in the classic sense) model.
This article is de facto proof that private ownership of the forest by those with a vested interest in the forest (the native indians) will work.
2) You are trying to use the tragedy of the commons to try to justify the commons (communal ownership of the forest) as the best economic model. Very ironic.