Right now, one of the "big ideas" in the scientific journal biz is "pay to publish" - since restricting electronic distribution is an obviously stupid thing, the industry is scrambling to think of something.
A lot of people there seem to think it makes sense for the author of the paper being published to pay for the publication costs himself - the argument is that the fees can just be folded into the researcher's grant proposal and so won't have much of a negative effect.
I personally think that idea is very stupid, and I hope that as the Aussies have rebeled so does the scientific community. The people who benefit from the work should be the ones to pay for it in some fashion or another.
For example the aussies ought to look at a peer-reviewed system where comment posters get discounted to free access while lurkers have to pay "full" price (note the peer-review to insure bogus posts don't flood the system just for free access, peer-reviewing would also qualify for discountage).
For the journals, I think the "lurkers" ought to pay too - the university libraries and corporations that currently pay for subscriptions should continue to pay, in advance. As long as enough groups pay in advance to fund the journal's operations, the results would be free to all. If not enough groups are willing to buy subscriptions, then the journal should either close down and give all the money back, or operate on a smaller budget with a smaller number of articles published.
Saying that Star Wars should be written about Han is so absent mindedly lame it's no wonder Wedon fans watched the Angel disaster err Apocolypse.
The only "star wars" books I ever thought were any fun at all were the 3 Han Solo books by Brian Daley. I expect Serenity to be at least as entertaining as those books were.
Let's not forget the first Buffy movie. If anyone even remembers it.
I've got it recorded in hidef, you got a problem with that?
It only takes one slip-up to create a critical vulnerability, exposing a position or future activity.
You are absolutely correct about correlating multiple sources of seemingly innocuous information to make conclusions about truly classified information. For example, that's what Tom Clancy does as part of his background research for his books and has reportedly been accurate enough to get himself interviewed by the military to prove he was not actually in posession of classified documents.
HOWEVER, that still is not a sufficient excuse to cover over-zealous classification. The citizenry's right to an accountable and uncorrupt government is at least equal, and in my opinion greater than, the government's right to protect itself. It is another manifestation of that old saying about how freedom is not free. If we want to be free from tyranny, then we have to accept a less than 100% efficient government.
I would like to thank the people at Apple who did not do the idiotic thing and run this at 1960x1080 (1040i) interlaced, which looks damn awful on most computer screens.
If the original source is film (which it almost always is), then it is a relatively trivial operation to turn 1080i into 1080p which looks fantastic on most computer screens. I do it every day watching brodacast HDTV from NBC and CBS which are always 1080i.
Fix the examination and approval process, and the patent system will almost certainly sort itself out again without any legislative changes.
Doubtful.
Forget about silly patents. A big problem with patents today is cross-licensing and patent-pooling. In a nutshell it works like this:
Big companies join together in "co-ompetition" and pool their patents, if a company want access to any of their patents the price of entrance is that the new company's patents go into the patent pool and are all automatically cross-licensed to other poolers.
Enter little guy with a great idea. He patents it. But in order to implement the patent and manufacture a product using it, it just so happens that he needs to license a minor patent in one of these patent pools. It also turns out that at least one member of that pool is a potential competitor.
So now the little guy is stuck in a catch-22 - the only guarantee of profitability for his new business is the exclusive right to sell products based on his patented idea. But in order to produce those products, he must give up the exclusivity of his patent protection to his biggest potential competitors.
The only reasonable way out is to outright sell his patent to a big company that is already a member of the aforementioned patent pool, probably the one most likely to compete with him. Obviously the fact that he can't make use of the patent himself means that its value on the open market is greatly reduced, and once a great behemoth of a company gets ahold of the patent who knows how well it be implemented or sat on completely forgotten during the next corporate layoff. So, neither the creator nor society in general benefits much at all in this scenario.
Is it a common scenario? I've been told it is, but I really don't know. It certainly sounds plausible enough what with all the media coverage of patents and patent pools in the last 10 years or so.
Just as we don't expect them to tell us we should close our source.
Alrighty then.
Lock that damn source code UP!
I am sick and tired of seeing your source. It's digusting. Your source is to the software community as the boston strangler is to the sexy cheerleader home alone, naked.
I refuse to pay a dime for your software until you lock it up TIGHT!
Just because a board is in agreement on an action does not necessarily make the action any more legitimate. One of the SEC's big pushes is reform of corporate governance, in particular requirements with the goal of making the board members independent in more than word alone.
I really have no choice about letting my credit card companies track me. But because I use single-use credit card numbers for all online purchases, plus unique email addresses for all online merchants and slight variations in spelling for my name and address, it makes it difficult for an information aggregation service to put together much of a picture based on online purchases. For b&m purchases, I make an effort to use cash, avoid rebates, coupons and supermarkets with "shopper cards."
So, yeah, I make an effort to buy everything in cash, eh.
My sympathies are with the man whose life they're laying bare (irrespective of how they cast it) rather than the money-grabbing publishing house. "Quite surprised" is a laugh as well - they sent the proofs to Apple for approval and were asked to withhold publishing. WTF did they expect ?
That Apple would not carry THAT book?
As an Apple shareholder I do not see how this move, in any way benefits me. All I see is that Apple is turning away customers with hard green cash in hand for some arbitrary reason. It isn't like Jobs has some grand plan, the way he did when he killed the mac clone market. I don't see the Apple Press publishing equivalent-or-better titles. All I see is good money going to some other merchant, and now after all of this hullabaloo, even MORE money going to other merchants.
If I use a coupon to buy a can of green beans at the supermarket then you are damn right I think about where the coupon came from and how it came to be in my posession. Does my use of the coupon generate a kick-back to some information broker? Does it cause an update to a secret "consumer profile" that I have little chance of ever seeing myself?
And before you go off and say how amazon referrers are different, you should of that of that before making the reference to a B&M store in the first place.
Here is a story that I heard from a friend of a friend...
Some of you may recall that Redhat made a "Friends & Family" offer for 100 IPO shares to each person listed in the credits section of the linux kernel README file.
Apparently, anyone residing outside of the USA was not elligible for this offer. So, an enterprising (devious?) fellow went through the list of foreign email addresses in the credits file that were dead - i.e. bouncing any incoming message and impersonated them with freemail accounts - for example if JohanJones@stutgart.de was listed and his address was bouncing this guy created a JohanJones@hotmail.com and told etrade (the broker handling the friends and family offer) that he was the guy behind that address (even though his real name did not match the "name" of the email address).
Apparently he was able to acquire over a thousand shares at pre-IPO prices that way, and flipped them all somewhere over $90 each. At least so goes the story. I've got no proof, but at least it sounds good.
And if it is true, it might just qualify as the first reverse-phishing exploit where a regular guy fooled a big bank (etrade) into thinking he was some other regular guy(s) based on phony but plausible email addresses.
The only way the device itself transparently could encrypt/decrypt contents would be with some kind of password/key interface on the device itself.
I disagree, it could accept the password as data from the host - with nice software for windows boxen or a simple "echo password >/dev/dsk/c0t0d1" dealio under unix or other similar OSes.
Also you'd have to add a few more chips to the device to support the cryptographic functions which could definitely change the footprint and power requirements.
Yes, it would need more chipage, but the additions should be small enough to be trivially supported by USB.
But if the protection is software based than you don't need to worry about tampering (since the data on the fob is useless otherwise).
Despite my joking about pr0n and such (and the multiple nurbs who modded my post a troll, wtf?) I really am looking for such a device with physical tamper-proofing, on the order of level 4 because even AES-256 alone isn't really sufficient.
For the most part, all of these units are the same with only minor variation in features and performance.
What I am looking for is a usb thumbdrive/fob/whatever that has strong anti-tamper security features. I'm talking about on the level of FIPS 140 Level 4 which, among other things, means that it probably encrypts all of its contents and if it detects an attempt to physically get at its innards, it erases the data. Note that levels 1 through 3 are all pretty much the same, but level 4 is a big leap up in protection from level 3.
I need this to store all my drug deal accounts receivables, and to keep my wife and her electron tunnelling microscope from finding my pr0n.
For everybody else they do provide decent free nekkid women -- 25% will kill your boner dead, 50% won't do a thing for you or to you, 20% are worth a few looks and about 5% will rekindle that hope you had as a teenager that a regular slob like you could possibly make it with a super-model quality girl, yow-za.
Yeah, I know it is backwards compatible with regular mp3 players, but who just about nobody uses it, or has the "pro" decoder part installed. They should have gone with regular mp3 for backwards compatibility and a second copy with a completely different, more efficient low-bitrate codec like wma.
us engineers think it's a terrible idea, given how much work and technical discussion is recorded in email.
The single most useful thing I've learned from watching management types is -- if you can't solve the problem, redefine the question. In your case, the answer is simple, let all the execulawyer types continue to use email, meanwhile the people who do real work need to cut over to the new, uh, hhm, imessage system, yeah imessage, that's the ticket! You can put a bridge in so that the people using the legacy email system can communicate with the imessage users and vice-versa.
This will allow the execulawyers to maintain their strategy of protecting fellow suits' email-trail while allowing everybody else to get on with their jobs in an efficient manner. If you are (un)lucky, you could make the imessage system implementation a six-sigma project and kill two birds with one stone. You will be a frickn' hero!
How can anyone take an article seriously when the very first sentence just screams, "AMATEUR!!" like this one does:
Intel may very well go down in history as the first processor manufacturer with a dual-core solution, if only by three days.
IBM Power4, Power5 HP PA-8800 Sun Sparc IV
All full-fledged dual-core processors shipping long before Intel -- HP's been shipping for over a year and IBM's already well in to their 2nd generation of dual core processors with Power5.
Sure, you can excuse the author with some hand-waving about x86 context only or whatever. But if they really knew what they were talking about, they would have said it that way - or at least a competent editor would have corrected it. If these guys can't even get the trivial stuff right, how can anyone trust them to get the real technical details right?
If I have a place of business, and I set up a CC camera system recording all entries/motion in my shop to a hard drive, (and have a sign up saying all activity is being monitored by cameras) can it possibly be illegal to do with that footage as I please?
Yes. If the people appearing in the video do not sign consent forms, you can not publish the parts of the video where they are indentifiable. That's the reason you occasionally see people with blurred out faces on those reality shows, those are the people the producers were unable to secure consent from.
Now, would simply making a copy of the survellience video and giving it to another party, like the RIAA, be enough to require consent? I do not know, but without thinking about it too deeply. I think it *ought* to require consent.
In fact, there is a major difference, even in theory. A white LED light is produced by combining red, green, and blue LEDs.
bah lone ey
All modern white LEDs are single indium gallium emitters in the blue to uv range that are coated with a phosphor somewhat like that in a flourescent lamp. The energy from the blue led excites the phosphor into producing a multitude of wavelengths which we perceive as "white." Generally, the thicker the phosporus coating, the warmer the light (lower color temperature). The output is definitely a lot richer than three simple RGB wavelengths.
There are already custom LED flashlights that are brighter than any "normal" flashlight, but they are not yet what most people would consider affordable (hand-held HIDs are not "normal" and tend to be even more expensive).
Here's my current favorite, just a little bigger than my thumb and bright enough to light up the garage door of the house across the street.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now, one of the "big ideas" in the scientific journal biz is "pay to publish" - since restricting electronic distribution is an obviously stupid thing, the industry is scrambling to think of something.
A lot of people there seem to think it makes sense for the author of the paper being published to pay for the publication costs himself - the argument is that the fees can just be folded into the researcher's grant proposal and so won't have much of a negative effect.
I personally think that idea is very stupid, and I hope that as the Aussies have rebeled so does the scientific community. The people who benefit from the work should be the ones to pay for it in some fashion or another.
For example the aussies ought to look at a peer-reviewed system where comment posters get discounted to free access while lurkers have to pay "full" price (note the peer-review to insure bogus posts don't flood the system just for free access, peer-reviewing would also qualify for discountage).
For the journals, I think the "lurkers" ought to pay too - the university libraries and corporations that currently pay for subscriptions should continue to pay, in advance. As long as enough groups pay in advance to fund the journal's operations, the results would be free to all. If not enough groups are willing to buy subscriptions, then the journal should either close down and give all the money back, or operate on a smaller budget with a smaller number of articles published.
Saying that Star Wars should be written about Han is so absent mindedly lame it's no wonder Wedon fans watched the Angel disaster err Apocolypse.
The only "star wars" books I ever thought were any fun at all were the 3 Han Solo books by Brian Daley. I expect Serenity to be at least as entertaining as those books were.
Let's not forget the first Buffy movie. If anyone even remembers it.
I've got it recorded in hidef, you got a problem with that?
It only takes one slip-up to create a critical vulnerability, exposing a position or future activity.
You are absolutely correct about correlating multiple sources of seemingly innocuous information to make conclusions about truly classified information. For example, that's what Tom Clancy does as part of his background research for his books and has reportedly been accurate enough to get himself interviewed by the military to prove he was not actually in posession of classified documents.
HOWEVER, that still is not a sufficient excuse to cover over-zealous classification. The citizenry's right to an accountable and uncorrupt government is at least equal, and in my opinion greater than, the government's right to protect itself. It is another manifestation of that old saying about how freedom is not free. If we want to be free from tyranny, then we have to accept a less than 100% efficient government.
I would like to thank the people at Apple who did not do the idiotic thing and run this at 1960x1080 (1040i) interlaced, which looks damn awful on most computer screens.
If the original source is film (which it almost always is), then it is a relatively trivial operation to turn 1080i into 1080p which looks fantastic on most computer screens. I do it every day watching brodacast HDTV from NBC and CBS which are always 1080i.
Fix the examination and approval process, and the patent system will almost certainly sort itself out again without any legislative changes.
Doubtful.
Forget about silly patents. A big problem with patents today is cross-licensing and patent-pooling. In a nutshell it works like this:
Big companies join together in "co-ompetition" and pool their patents, if a company want access to any of their patents the price of entrance is that the new company's patents go into the patent pool and are all automatically cross-licensed to other poolers.
Enter little guy with a great idea. He patents it. But in order to implement the patent and manufacture a product using it, it just so happens that he needs to license a minor patent in one of these patent pools. It also turns out that at least one member of that pool is a potential competitor.
So now the little guy is stuck in a catch-22 - the only guarantee of profitability for his new business is the exclusive right to sell products based on his patented idea. But in order to produce those products, he must give up the exclusivity of his patent protection to his biggest potential competitors.
The only reasonable way out is to outright sell his patent to a big company that is already a member of the aforementioned patent pool, probably the one most likely to compete with him. Obviously the fact that he can't make use of the patent himself means that its value on the open market is greatly reduced, and once a great behemoth of a company gets ahold of the patent who knows how well it be implemented or sat on completely forgotten during the next corporate layoff. So, neither the creator nor society in general benefits much at all in this scenario.
Is it a common scenario? I've been told it is, but I really don't know. It certainly sounds plausible enough what with all the media coverage of patents and patent pools in the last 10 years or so.
Just as we don't expect them to tell us we should close our source.
Alrighty then.
Lock that damn source code UP!
I am sick and tired of seeing your source. It's digusting.
Your source is to the software community as the boston strangler is to the sexy cheerleader home alone, naked.
I refuse to pay a dime for your software until you lock it up TIGHT!
It could be much harder to make this work in FOSS circles, as MS really doesn't have anything to offer them
.bomb took it all away.
Hookers.
Free Hookers.
For about 30 seconds, linux was sexy and guys wearing red hats stuffed with shares could pick up the chicks.
Then the
But MS still has boatloads, freaking tanker-loads, of cash.
Do not underestimate the power of free with beer poon to halt all progress in the Free software world.
Just because a board is in agreement on an action does not necessarily make the action any more legitimate. One of the SEC's big pushes is reform of corporate governance, in particular requirements with the goal of making the board members independent in more than word alone.
It depends on who is tracking it.
I really have no choice about letting my credit card companies track me. But because I use single-use credit card numbers for all online purchases, plus unique email addresses for all online merchants and slight variations in spelling for my name and address, it makes it difficult for an information aggregation service to put together much of a picture based on online purchases. For b&m purchases, I make an effort to use cash, avoid rebates, coupons and supermarkets with "shopper cards."
So, yeah, I make an effort to buy everything in cash, eh.
My sympathies are with the man whose life they're laying bare (irrespective of how they cast it) rather than the money-grabbing publishing house. "Quite surprised" is a laugh as well - they sent the proofs to Apple for approval and were asked to withhold publishing. WTF did they expect ?
That Apple would not carry THAT book?
As an Apple shareholder I do not see how this move, in any way benefits me. All I see is that Apple is turning away customers with hard green cash in hand for some arbitrary reason. It isn't like Jobs has some grand plan, the way he did when he killed the mac clone market. I don't see the Apple Press publishing equivalent-or-better titles. All I see is good money going to some other merchant, and now after all of this hullabaloo, even MORE money going to other merchants.
If I use a coupon to buy a can of green beans at the supermarket then you are damn right I think about where the coupon came from and how it came to be in my posession. Does my use of the coupon generate a kick-back to some information broker? Does it cause an update to a secret "consumer profile" that I have little chance of ever seeing myself?
And before you go off and say how amazon referrers are different, you should of that of that before making the reference to a B&M store in the first place.
Here is a story that I heard from a friend of a friend...
Some of you may recall that Redhat made a "Friends & Family" offer for 100 IPO shares to each person listed in the credits section of the linux kernel README file.
Apparently, anyone residing outside of the USA was not elligible for this offer. So, an enterprising (devious?) fellow went through the list of foreign email addresses in the credits file that were dead - i.e. bouncing any incoming message and impersonated them with freemail accounts - for example if JohanJones@stutgart.de was listed and his address was bouncing this guy created a JohanJones@hotmail.com and told etrade (the broker handling the friends and family offer) that he was the guy behind that address (even though his real name did not match the "name" of the email address).
Apparently he was able to acquire over a thousand shares at pre-IPO prices that way, and flipped them all somewhere over $90 each. At least so goes the story. I've got no proof, but at least it sounds good.
And if it is true, it might just qualify as the first reverse-phishing exploit where a regular guy fooled a big bank (etrade) into thinking he was some other regular guy(s) based on phony but plausible email addresses.
The only way the device itself transparently could encrypt/decrypt contents would be with some kind of password/key interface on the device itself.
/dev/dsk/c0t0d1" dealio under unix or other similar OSes.
I disagree, it could accept the password as data from the host - with nice software for windows boxen or a simple "echo password >
Also you'd have to add a few more chips to the device to support the cryptographic functions which could definitely change the footprint and power requirements.
Yes, it would need more chipage, but the additions should be small enough to be trivially supported by USB.
But if the protection is software based than you don't need to worry about tampering (since the data on the fob is useless otherwise).
Despite my joking about pr0n and such (and the multiple nurbs who modded my post a troll, wtf?) I really am looking for such a device with physical tamper-proofing, on the order of level 4 because even AES-256 alone isn't really sufficient.
For the most part, all of these units are the same with only minor variation in features and performance.
What I am looking for is a usb thumbdrive/fob/whatever that has strong anti-tamper security features. I'm talking about on the level of FIPS 140 Level 4 which, among other things, means that it probably encrypts all of its contents and if it detects an attempt to physically get at its innards, it erases the data. Note that levels 1 through 3 are all pretty much the same, but level 4 is a big leap up in protection from level 3.
I need this to store all my drug deal accounts receivables,
and to keep my wife and her electron tunnelling microscope from finding my pr0n.
Try http://www.watchersweb.com/
They are all amateur porn, but I don't think they pay.
For everybody else they do provide decent free nekkid women -- 25% will kill your boner dead, 50% won't do a thing for you or to you, 20% are worth a few looks and about 5% will rekindle that hope you had as a teenager that a regular slob like you could possibly make it with a super-model quality girl, yow-za.
MP3Pro??
WTF?
Yeah, I know it is backwards compatible with regular mp3 players, but who just about nobody uses it, or has the "pro" decoder part installed. They should have gone with regular mp3 for backwards compatibility and a second copy with a completely different, more efficient low-bitrate codec like wma.
(Now, who thought I was going to say vorbis?)
us engineers think it's a terrible idea, given how much work and technical discussion is recorded in email.
The single most useful thing I've learned from watching management types is -- if you can't solve the problem, redefine the question. In your case, the answer is simple, let all the execulawyer types continue to use email, meanwhile the people who do real work need to cut over to the new, uh, hhm, imessage system, yeah imessage, that's the ticket! You can put a bridge in so that the people using the legacy email system can communicate with the imessage users and vice-versa.
This will allow the execulawyers to maintain their strategy of protecting fellow suits' email-trail while allowing everybody else to get on with their jobs in an efficient manner. If you are (un)lucky, you could make the imessage system implementation a six-sigma project and kill two birds with one stone. You will be a frickn' hero!
How can anyone take an article seriously when the very first sentence just screams, "AMATEUR!!" like this one does:
Intel may very well go down in history as the first processor manufacturer with a dual-core solution, if only by three days.
IBM Power4, Power5
HP PA-8800
Sun Sparc IV
All full-fledged dual-core processors shipping long before Intel -- HP's been shipping for over a year and IBM's already well in to their 2nd generation of dual core processors with Power5.
Sure, you can excuse the author with some hand-waving about x86 context only or whatever. But if they really knew what they were talking about, they would have said it that way - or at least a competent editor would have corrected it. If these guys can't even get the trivial stuff right, how can anyone trust them to get the real technical details right?
But, virtually every law has its origins in morality.
The two cannot be separated.
I don't know about your country, but in the USA the corporate lobbyists made that seperation long ago!
Where did my damn mod points expire too?
Mod up the Sunlighter.
Boiling (and freezing) help too.
If I have a place of business, and I set up a CC camera system recording all entries/motion in my shop to a hard drive, (and have a sign up saying all activity is being monitored by cameras) can it possibly be illegal to do with that footage as I please?
Yes. If the people appearing in the video do not sign consent forms, you can not publish the parts of the video where they are indentifiable. That's the reason you occasionally see people with blurred out faces on those reality shows, those are the people the producers were unable to secure consent from.
Now, would simply making a copy of the survellience video and giving it to another party, like the RIAA, be enough to require consent? I do not know, but without thinking about it too deeply. I think it *ought* to require consent.
This is a complete misstatment of the law.
True, but only until the RIAA hires a senator or two to sponsor legislation that says otherwise.
In fact, there is a major difference, even in theory. A white LED light is produced by combining red, green, and blue LEDs.
bah
lone
ey
All modern white LEDs are single indium gallium emitters in the blue to uv range that are coated with a phosphor somewhat like that in a flourescent lamp. The energy from the blue led excites the phosphor into producing a multitude of wavelengths which we perceive as "white." Generally, the thicker the phosporus coating, the warmer the light (lower color temperature). The output is definitely a lot richer than three simple RGB wavelengths.
There are already custom LED flashlights that are brighter than any "normal" flashlight, but they are not yet what most people would consider affordable (hand-held HIDs are not "normal" and tend to be even more expensive).
t m
Here's my current favorite, just a little bigger than my thumb and bright enough to light up the garage door of the house across the street.
http://ledmuseum.candlepower.us/second/lionhart.h