Those reasons are...? You can't just throw a potential solution away and say that the reasons for rejection are obvious, without saying what they are.
Okay, I see I expected a bit too much there. Let me put it this way: The current nuclear powers that be see naval nuclear technology as a weapon technology. If we wanted to run every merchant ship in the world (such was my initial remark) to run on nuclear energy, this technology would have to be freely available to every country, every shipmaker in the world. I'm not sure it would go down well with, e.g. the American public to hear about Saudi Arabian, Afghan, Iranian and Iraquian merchant ships (all manned by Philippino crews) carrying nuclear devices right into American ports.[1]
I realise you will come up with all sorts of ideas on how to contain the radioactive material and make sure nobody can do anything bad with it, it can not accidentally leak, come into contact with sea water, or be expelled into the air during fires. You might even come up with the one ingenious idea that actually solves all these problems. Still, I'm sure we will all be getting our electricity from photovoltaic farms in Africa by the time you manage to sell this to the mainstream public.
It's hard enough to explain the necessity of land-based Nuclear Power Plants to the public right now. I think it's counterproductive to start phantasizing about container ships running on Uranium.
[1] It'll be 5 minutes before someone will label me a racist. I love the internet.
I don't hold out much hope that a lossless format sold thru iTunes will truly be lossless. After all, converting an LP to 16-bit 44.1KHz WAV is, by definition, lossy (but outside of the perceptions of 95+% of the people out there)... To add, part of the reason that iTunes even sells DRM-free music is because the record companies can say "if you want higher quality, buy the CD or, better yet, vinyl!"
So, just to get this straight: You think of Vinyl records as a lossless format and believe they have a higher quality than CDs? That's a strange definition of "lossless" to me, but let not argue about that. What intrigues me more is, how on earth are you currently storing this music "truly losslessly" on your firmware-updated iPod? Did you install a sapphire?
We need to learn how to extract most of our energy from renewable resources (solar, wind, tidal [and nuclear as a stopgap])
Strapping kites onto oil tankers will only help perpetuate the outdated, unsustainable economies we rely on today. Developing technologies that save the shipping company $1600/day is a waste of time and effort.
While I agree that some "hybrid" (as in hybrid car) solutions are useless for tackling climate change, I have to disagree with you here. Ships have a similar problem as airplanes in that they can't be powered on batteries (too heavy) and thus cannot be powered by electricity produced elsewhere. Also, we don't want every merchant ship in the world to have a nuclear reactor on board, for obvious reasons. So sails are indeed an interesting idea, especially as they are proven to work, don't create any emissions and could, as the technology matures, be scaled up to supply much more of the needed thrust, maybe nearly all of it. This new system actually looks like it does exactly what you are asking for (extract energy from renewable sources).
Also, ships don't only carry oil. They bring us all the nice little cheap stuff from all over the world, allowing producers to exploit huge economies of scale (which, in the long run, might well benefit the environment, too). I don't think we will be able to live without them any time soon.
The issue is extremely contentious and and very political at the moment.
You are right, but in this case it is not a bad thing for the discussion to be political. The question at hand is that, given we have seen several deadly uses of Tasers (i.e. uses where the subject died subsequently, without any other obvious causes, such as a drug overdose), and given the numerous leaked videos showing Tasers being used on already restrained victims, many people (including me) start to think that it was and is a bad idea to give Police the right to use Tasers.
I think it's a psychological thing. There's no strong negative feedback to the person using the taser, there are no obvious marks being left on the victim, it is difficult for the victim to communicate just how painful the taser drive was to him, and the policemen consider the taser to be non-lethal. All that makes them highly likely to use tasers in situations where their use is entirely unnecessary.
Working as an EMT several years ago, I have personally had to restrain people suffering from hypoglycaemia -- a state very similar to what might be called "excited delirium". In one case, it took five men to hold down a homeless woman so that we could give her the live-saving glucose injection. Nevertheless, we managed to do so without hurting or even bruising her. For us her behaviour was easily explained by her blood-sugar levels, but I imagine a policeman without medical training would have taken her to be aggressive and might have thought it a good idea to taser her -- which certainly wouldn't have helped, given that she was already horribly agitated. The situations where I think Tasers are justified get fewer every day. I think it's about time we take this things out of our police officers' hands.
That's a translation problem. The agency in question here is the "Verfassungsschutz" (meaning, ironically, "Federal Agency for the Protection of the Constitution"), which is the German Version of the NSA (not that this name is any better). The submitter just couldn't be bothered to go through all that hassle and called it "the police".
Now, while the VS certainly doesn't have the means of the NSA, it is indeed a rather sophisticated service, and I am entirely convinced it is not beyond their means to employ really good security experts.
unless you're in a car crash and passed out just after you dialed 112. yeah, way better system.
How does the US system help in your scenario? Somehow, I don't believe they'll send out a SWA-Team to every phone accidentally calling 911.
As one of my instructors during EMT training said: "You can always construct a case where even the best system fails. Let's face it, some people will simply fall through the net. Our job is to make sure this happens as rarely as reasonably possible."
I think that's exactly the point the submitter is raising: Say you post a link on slashdot to some random website. When I stumble over your post, coming from a search engine, in five years, the chance for this link to still work is p(x), the probability of that random website remaining live for 5 years.
Now, if you used tinyurl for your link, the chance for the link to not be broken by then is p(x)*p(y), where p(y) is the chance of tinyurl surviving the next 5 years. Since p(y) is less than 1, this lowers your chance to send me this little piece of information forward to in five years time.
The internet is built on dense connectivity, with no single node being able to uniquely control access to a large part of the whole net. Tinyurl works against this principle. If someone switched off tinyurl now, 54 Million links would break in an instant, all over the web, with no chance to correct them all automatically.
In other words, to return your ad hominem attack: If you expect Tinyurl to stay exactly where and what it is for the next 5 years, you have misunderstood the web.
The post I responded to made the unfounded statement that no one known to the poster hated Microsoft Office. Well, I do. Superior products exist, or existed before Microsoft forced them out of business.
Could you tell us which? Surely not OpenOffice (if only for the fact that their Menus are just as clunky as Word's. You seem to be very focussed on this issue. By the way, I quite like the new "ribbons" in Office 2007). Also, surely not emacs and the like. As you rightly say, they are not word processors.
Don't get me wrong: I've been using LaTeX with AucTeX in emacs to write every single text document (including letters) I printed in the past three years, except for the occasional note to put up next to the coffee machine (for which I use Word) and a few highly customized high quality print flyers I prepared in Adobe InDesign. LaTeX is the only right way for typesetting bare text, but that's not what office users want: They want a shiny screen that shows them how the text they type is going to look on paper, with an interface that gracely reveals more and more functionality as the user matures. In my eyes, Word does just that. And well.
In the early hours of yesterday morning, I was sitting in a rowing boat with seven other guys (and a girl in the back), sweating and puffing. We passed a meadow where a group of cows were grazing. One of them was standing underneath a tree, with it's head raised, trying to grab a leaf from a branch with it's tongue. It looked _very_ much like it was enjoying itself.
For a moment there, I had to think about whether our cows are actually much happier than we are. True, they get slaughtered at some point, but they also get free food, lots of free time, free health care, frequent sex with handsome bulls, and many stables nowadays even have cow washing machines. That's probably as close as you can get to paradise, from a bovine point of view. In contrast, I constantly have to think about my career path, founding a family, staying in shape, and how I can impress my boss.
I'm not sure, but could it be that getting herded for meat by aliens might actually be an amazingly nice experience? As long as they use a painless killing mechanism that's quick and unexpected?
...neglects the truth, that it actually has been fried,äh freed.
you gave yourself away there, Central European friend.:-) Very nice slip of the keyboard (and of your internal grammar check, for the comma at the start of the subordinate clause).
Yes, please mod me off-topic and obscure.
"One cent for every dollar of the purchase prize", in my book, is a 1% VAT. Am I right? Because a 1% tax on nearly every item sold is not "just one cent", it's a considerable new tax burden.
Because it's horribly complicated to create a spherical magnetic field to contain Plasma in it. You probably had Maxwell's equations in college? The divergence of the magnetic field is zero, thus magnetic field lines always have to be closed. It's topologically really hard to build a spherical field out of that.
Exactly! And that's were the sex comes in. I don't know how I could've lived through my puberty without the sex. If it was would've just been for being ugly, having no friends, being melancholic and having the strangest sense of humour in class, I would've literally killed myself. There's nothing like getting laid to properly cheer you up.
Unfortunately, unlike cars, MacBooks have an easy-to-reach Power Button which, when pressed for five seconds, switches off about every software-based alarm system.
The first reason, and the less sure one and more petty one, is that I feel that Adobe ruins all software over time. If you think carefully about this, and if you have sufficient experience with Adobe software, you will agree with me. The only project Adobe has not completely destroyed is Photoshop, and that is only because they move most cautiously with that product. If they screwed up Photoshop they would cease to exist yesterday.
Actually, I quite like the Adobe Creative Suite. Did you ever try the real Acrobat, i.e. the full version, not the reader? It's an amazing tool: You can do reviews of texts among a group of people, including mere mortals. They will intuitively know how to use it, it does what they want, and it works. Illustrator is even cooler. You can actually open a pdf and do with it whatever you like. Move text, change single letters, add stuff, copy elements, whatever. InDesign is the perfect print preprocessing tool. (I'm not in the printing business, but I've written a few large documents in (pdf)LaTeX (with lots of (pdf) figures) and the odd fancy one-page flyer). I'm managing my webpage in GoLive, although I will readily admit that this particular piece of the suite has its quirks. I got hooked up to the Creative Suite when I worked at an institution that had a licence. A few months ago, I actually purchased it for myself. I don't know of any other software package for document-handling out there that's this well-documented, easy to use yet powerful.
Now you're going to say: "Of course, it's because Adobe is the inventor of the stupid portable document format, so no wonder they know all the tricks." You know what? You're right. In fact, Adobe even changes the definitions of pdf with every new release of the reader. I don't care. PDFs are the only format for documents besides Microsofts moronic.doc Word format that normal people know of. I can't send dvi's or postscripts to publishers, not even to non-techie friends. Adobe has not only developed a nice toolbox, the also deliver the userbase with it, right to my door. It might be that their software uses quite a lot of memory and processing power, but it also actually does what I want it to do. That's more to me. I've got the CPU cycles to burn.
Re:Is Roland Piquepaille paid for Slashdot stories
on
A Single-Photon Server
·
· Score: 5, Informative
While I've heard of Piquepaille before, I think this specific story is somewhat different.
The Max Planck Society is a public foundation (a wierd legal construction in Germany. In a nutshell: it's a federal agency) and certainly does not have to care about outside sources of funding enough to try publicity stunts (disclaimer: I work at a Max Planck Institute, though a different one than the one linked here. Funding is generous compared to other scientific workplaces and constant over long periods of time. Partly as a consequence, the number of applicants for PhD and PostDoc positions is long enough. There's no need to advertise on/.).
Further, this story has only one single link: To the institutes press release. From what I see, there are no redirects involved, especially not to Mr Piquepaille's blog, and the linked site contains no adverts (which, if otherwise, would be very strange indeed, coming from an MPI).
Last but not least: The research in question was published in Nature (Physics online) last week. That's about as much publicity as you want as a scientist.
So, I see where you're coming from, but I don't think this is an attempt to generate traffic. You also say you don't think stories like this should be published on/. as they be not connected to computing. Well, it's certainly news for nerds. (second disclaimer: I'm a physicist.)
On the one hand, you are right, if Deutsche Telekom builds a new network, one would assume that it is theirs and that they could do with it as they please, renting it out or keeping it to themselves.
On the other hand, the Telekom is a former state owned monopoly, and the German TelCo market is far from well balanced: It takes a huge investment to build a nationwide fiber-optics network, and it seems only the Telekom has the means to do so.
So do we want to regulate this market? I think, as with so many EU decisions, this is actually a very wise ruling that only looks ignorant at first sight. It will likely lead to a situation where the Telekom will refrain from building the network, eventually persuading the state (or a newly arrived competitor with lots, and I mean lots of cash on their hand) to build the network. High-speed internet access is a utility, nearly as important as energy by now. If the state builds the net and then rents it out to the ISPs (like it does now with the real life highways -- Germany has a highway toll system for trucks), the market might tend to be much better balanced. Unfortunately, most of the political arenas were the EU has a say are complicated, free market economy issues like that: The best rulings are often only understandable for insiders and tend to seem unfair to the general public. The EU definitely needs to find a few areas of more popular value to brush up its image among the unwashed masses, lest it turns into a hugely unpopular bureaucratic monster.
I'll be happy to defend that in court. German copyright protection law states that, to be liable of copyright infringement, you have to get the material from an obviously illegal source. It's definitely not clear that allofmp3.com is (was) such a source.
Besides, I don't know of a single case against an allofmp3 customer anywhere in the world. Definitely not in Germany. Even in the case of a conviction, it would certainly be a financial one, no jail time. The "Pirates are criminals" slogan is just FUD comming off the Recording industry.
Finally, I doubt the police would get the warrant for a database search based on a copyright case.
Post-finally: I buy my music from iTunes, you insensitive clod.:-)
Actually, I think this search qualifies as "specific", because every single customer data set that was handed over to the authorities by the banks is highly suspicious of having commited a crime (consciously bying child pornography is a felony under German law). Of course, there's still the chance of fraudulent card use, but this can and will be checked during the court hearings that will follow.
You see, to ask a question like yours,
"We have sound suspicions that a bloke called Wolfgang has been accessing this list of kiddie porn websites. Could you provide us with a list of transactions Wolfgang has made to them please."
would necessitate knowledge about someone's internet usage, which in turn would take a search of ISP databases to generate. Fortunately, the German police didn't (couldn't) do so: They just found out about this specific, obviously criminal, website and asked the banks: Tell us who are their customers. That's a far cry from sifting through millions of records for clues of illegal behaviour, as we have come to see a lot of lately in the wake of the "war on terror".
The important bit is that the law enforcement agencies never got their hands on the records of the 22 Million innocent people (including mine, as I own a German credit card). I don't mind the fact that the banks did a search on their own database. They do so all the time to prevent fraud (which is good for me, the customer). As long as my private data remains with the bank that I trust my money on, I'm fine.
Try a Google (Scholar) search for ("blind") "Deconvolution", e.g. the Lucy-Richardson (if I recall correctly) algorithm. MatLab's image processing toolkit has some of them as built-in functions. It's one of the standard machine-learning problems.
In short: "Blurring", as most image processing software does it is a convolution (i.e. a multiplication in Fourier-Space) of the original image with a Gaussian kernel. Since the resulting image is real but the multiplication takes place in the full complex Fourier spectrum, information about the original image is lost during the convolution (the blurring): There is no inverse function to the convolution, in general. Nevertheless we can find the most probable original image, given the blurred one and, using knowledge about the struture of the original images (like, say, its Fourier spectrum, its entropy, etc), we can enhance this reconstruction.
Contemporary de-convolution algorithms (they are used in Astronomy, Microscopy, in Digital Cameras and a lot of other places) are much better than a layman would expect. While they can do no mathematical wonders, they definitely can restore amazingly clear images from what looks to the human eye like one big blurry blob.
I don't know much about the big corporations in the States, but over here in Germany, it is actually rather common for CEOs of big technical firms (and, being Germany, most of our big companies are technology producers) to have an education in natural sciences or technology.
The CEO of the national rail system, Hartmut Mehdorn, is a Mechanical Engineer.
famously, Ron Sommer, the former CEO of Deutsche Telekom (think T-Mobile in the states) is a very gifted Mathematician.
Dieter Zetsche, the CEO of Daimler Chrysler has a PhD in Engineering (hence "Dr. Z.").
Ferdinan Piech, the head of Volkswagen, studied mechanical engineering in Zurich and is a grandson of the archetype of the German Engineer, Ferdinand Porsche (who, before anyone corrects me, was, arguably, Czech, Austrian or German).
Speaking of which, the CEO of Porsche, Wendelin Wiedeking has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering.
The list continues for companies like the chemistry and pharma giant BASF (Jürgen Hambrecht, a chemist), SAP (all its founders, Hasso Plattner, Hans-Werner Hector, Klaus Tschira and Dietmar Hopp are either Physicists or Mathematicians), ThyssenKrupp (Ekkehard Schulz, a mining engineer), Robert Bosch Inc. (Hermann Scholl, an electrical engineer) and so on. Bear in mind we're not talking about people who directed their companies as startups like Microsoft or Apple, but CEOs of companies who already where global players before they joined (or were even born).
So, although these people probably qualify more as "leaders" than as managers, it is obviously possible to be a good techie and run a big company at the same time.
Strange. It's not just that Emmy Noether currently seems to be underestimated by the world. It seems this ignorance is actually conserved over time. There must be some symmetry to all of this.
"Activity on nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation's Chinese Wikipedia site has skyrocketed since its release, which Internet users in China first started reporting on Nov. 10. Since then, the number of new users registering to contribute to the site has exceeded 1,200 a day, up from an average of 300 to 400 prior to the unblocking. The number of new articles posted daily has increased 75% from the week before, with the total now surpassing 100,000, according to the foundation."
Actually, I think these are surprisingly low numbers. We are talking about a country with over 1 billion inhabitants (of which I assume at least 50 Million (0.5%) have access to the internet). Before the block, the site was, well, blocked. Now that is is unblocked the number of contributors has quadrupled? To satisfy the word "explosive", I would have expected a growth by at least an order of magnitude. Actually, even more. And a rise in the derivative of the article number by 75%? So all these new users on average actually contribute less to the wiki than the old (obviously dissident, why else would they use a blocked site) user base?
I think I read this data as: Wikipedia has been unblocked in China, but nearly nobody has actually noticed yet. Those that have signed up don't seem to be as active as the older members. Nothing very surprising here.
Slashdot Mirror
I realise you will come up with all sorts of ideas on how to contain the radioactive material and make sure nobody can do anything bad with it, it can not accidentally leak, come into contact with sea water, or be expelled into the air during fires. You might even come up with the one ingenious idea that actually solves all these problems. Still, I'm sure we will all be getting our electricity from photovoltaic farms in Africa by the time you manage to sell this to the mainstream public.
It's hard enough to explain the necessity of land-based Nuclear Power Plants to the public right now. I think it's counterproductive to start phantasizing about container ships running on Uranium.
[1] It'll be 5 minutes before someone will label me a racist. I love the internet.
While I agree that some "hybrid" (as in hybrid car) solutions are useless for tackling climate change, I have to disagree with you here. Ships have a similar problem as airplanes in that they can't be powered on batteries (too heavy) and thus cannot be powered by electricity produced elsewhere. Also, we don't want every merchant ship in the world to have a nuclear reactor on board, for obvious reasons. So sails are indeed an interesting idea, especially as they are proven to work, don't create any emissions and could, as the technology matures, be scaled up to supply much more of the needed thrust, maybe nearly all of it. This new system actually looks like it does exactly what you are asking for (extract energy from renewable sources).
Also, ships don't only carry oil. They bring us all the nice little cheap stuff from all over the world, allowing producers to exploit huge economies of scale (which, in the long run, might well benefit the environment, too). I don't think we will be able to live without them any time soon.
I think it's a psychological thing. There's no strong negative feedback to the person using the taser, there are no obvious marks being left on the victim, it is difficult for the victim to communicate just how painful the taser drive was to him, and the policemen consider the taser to be non-lethal. All that makes them highly likely to use tasers in situations where their use is entirely unnecessary.
Working as an EMT several years ago, I have personally had to restrain people suffering from hypoglycaemia -- a state very similar to what might be called "excited delirium". In one case, it took five men to hold down a homeless woman so that we could give her the live-saving glucose injection. Nevertheless, we managed to do so without hurting or even bruising her. For us her behaviour was easily explained by her blood-sugar levels, but I imagine a policeman without medical training would have taken her to be aggressive and might have thought it a good idea to taser her -- which certainly wouldn't have helped, given that she was already horribly agitated. The situations where I think Tasers are justified get fewer every day. I think it's about time we take this things out of our police officers' hands.
That's a translation problem. The agency in question here is the "Verfassungsschutz" (meaning, ironically, "Federal Agency for the Protection of the Constitution"), which is the German Version of the NSA (not that this name is any better). The submitter just couldn't be bothered to go through all that hassle and called it "the police".
Now, while the VS certainly doesn't have the means of the NSA, it is indeed a rather sophisticated service, and I am entirely convinced it is not beyond their means to employ really good security experts.
As one of my instructors during EMT training said: "You can always construct a case where even the best system fails. Let's face it, some people will simply fall through the net. Our job is to make sure this happens as rarely as reasonably possible."
I think that's exactly the point the submitter is raising: Say you post a link on slashdot to some random website. When I stumble over your post, coming from a search engine, in five years, the chance for this link to still work is p(x), the probability of that random website remaining live for 5 years.
Now, if you used tinyurl for your link, the chance for the link to not be broken by then is p(x)*p(y), where p(y) is the chance of tinyurl surviving the next 5 years. Since p(y) is less than 1, this lowers your chance to send me this little piece of information forward to in five years time.
The internet is built on dense connectivity, with no single node being able to uniquely control access to a large part of the whole net. Tinyurl works against this principle. If someone switched off tinyurl now, 54 Million links would break in an instant, all over the web, with no chance to correct them all automatically.
In other words, to return your ad hominem attack: If you expect Tinyurl to stay exactly where and what it is for the next 5 years, you have misunderstood the web.
Don't get me wrong: I've been using LaTeX with AucTeX in emacs to write every single text document (including letters) I printed in the past three years, except for the occasional note to put up next to the coffee machine (for which I use Word) and a few highly customized high quality print flyers I prepared in Adobe InDesign. LaTeX is the only right way for typesetting bare text, but that's not what office users want: They want a shiny screen that shows them how the text they type is going to look on paper, with an interface that gracely reveals more and more functionality as the user matures. In my eyes, Word does just that. And well.
In the early hours of yesterday morning, I was sitting in a rowing boat with seven other guys (and a girl in the back), sweating and puffing. We passed a meadow where a group of cows were grazing. One of them was standing underneath a tree, with it's head raised, trying to grab a leaf from a branch with it's tongue. It looked _very_ much like it was enjoying itself.
For a moment there, I had to think about whether our cows are actually much happier than we are. True, they get slaughtered at some point, but they also get free food, lots of free time, free health care, frequent sex with handsome bulls, and many stables nowadays even have cow washing machines. That's probably as close as you can get to paradise, from a bovine point of view. In contrast, I constantly have to think about my career path, founding a family, staying in shape, and how I can impress my boss.
I'm not sure, but could it be that getting herded for meat by aliens might actually be an amazingly nice experience? As long as they use a painless killing mechanism that's quick and unexpected?
"One cent for every dollar of the purchase prize", in my book, is a 1% VAT. Am I right? Because a 1% tax on nearly every item sold is not "just one cent", it's a considerable new tax burden.
Because it's horribly complicated to create a spherical magnetic field to contain Plasma in it. You probably had Maxwell's equations in college? The divergence of the magnetic field is zero, thus magnetic field lines always have to be closed. It's topologically really hard to build a spherical field out of that.
Unfortunately, unlike cars, MacBooks have an easy-to-reach Power Button which, when pressed for five seconds, switches off about every software-based alarm system.
Sorry.
Now you're going to say: "Of course, it's because Adobe is the inventor of the stupid portable document format, so no wonder they know all the tricks." You know what? You're right. In fact, Adobe even changes the definitions of pdf with every new release of the reader. I don't care. PDFs are the only format for documents besides Microsofts moronic
While I've heard of Piquepaille before, I think this specific story is somewhat different.
/.).
/. as they be not connected to computing. Well, it's certainly news for nerds. (second disclaimer: I'm a physicist.)
The Max Planck Society is a public foundation (a wierd legal construction in Germany. In a nutshell: it's a federal agency) and certainly does not have to care about outside sources of funding enough to try publicity stunts (disclaimer: I work at a Max Planck Institute, though a different one than the one linked here. Funding is generous compared to other scientific workplaces and constant over long periods of time. Partly as a consequence, the number of applicants for PhD and PostDoc positions is long enough. There's no need to advertise on
Further, this story has only one single link: To the institutes press release. From what I see, there are no redirects involved, especially not to Mr Piquepaille's blog, and the linked site contains no adverts (which, if otherwise, would be very strange indeed, coming from an MPI).
Last but not least: The research in question was published in Nature (Physics online) last week. That's about as much publicity as you want as a scientist.
So, I see where you're coming from, but I don't think this is an attempt to generate traffic. You also say you don't think stories like this should be published on
The situation is quite complicated here.
On the one hand, you are right, if Deutsche Telekom builds a new network, one would assume that it is theirs and that they could do with it as they please, renting it out or keeping it to themselves.
On the other hand, the Telekom is a former state owned monopoly, and the German TelCo market is far from well balanced: It takes a huge investment to build a nationwide fiber-optics network, and it seems only the Telekom has the means to do so.
So do we want to regulate this market? I think, as with so many EU decisions, this is actually a very wise ruling that only looks ignorant at first sight. It will likely lead to a situation where the Telekom will refrain from building the network, eventually persuading the state (or a newly arrived competitor with lots, and I mean lots of cash on their hand) to build the network. High-speed internet access is a utility, nearly as important as energy by now. If the state builds the net and then rents it out to the ISPs (like it does now with the real life highways -- Germany has a highway toll system for trucks), the market might tend to be much better balanced. Unfortunately, most of the political arenas were the EU has a say are complicated, free market economy issues like that: The best rulings are often only understandable for insiders and tend to seem unfair to the general public. The EU definitely needs to find a few areas of more popular value to brush up its image among the unwashed masses, lest it turns into a hugely unpopular bureaucratic monster.
I'll be happy to defend that in court. German copyright protection law states that, to be liable of copyright infringement, you have to get the material from an obviously illegal source. It's definitely not clear that allofmp3.com is (was) such a source.
:-)
Besides, I don't know of a single case against an allofmp3 customer anywhere in the world. Definitely not in Germany. Even in the case of a conviction, it would certainly be a financial one, no jail time. The "Pirates are criminals" slogan is just FUD comming off the Recording industry.
Finally, I doubt the police would get the warrant for a database search based on a copyright case.
Post-finally: I buy my music from iTunes, you insensitive clod.
You see, to ask a question like yours, would necessitate knowledge about someone's internet usage, which in turn would take a search of ISP databases to generate. Fortunately, the German police didn't (couldn't) do so: They just found out about this specific, obviously criminal, website and asked the banks: Tell us who are their customers. That's a far cry from sifting through millions of records for clues of illegal behaviour, as we have come to see a lot of lately in the wake of the "war on terror".
The important bit is that the law enforcement agencies never got their hands on the records of the 22 Million innocent people (including mine, as I own a German credit card). I don't mind the fact that the banks did a search on their own database. They do so all the time to prevent fraud (which is good for me, the customer). As long as my private data remains with the bank that I trust my money on, I'm fine.
Try a Google (Scholar) search for ("blind") "Deconvolution", e.g. the Lucy-Richardson (if I recall correctly) algorithm. MatLab's image processing toolkit has some of them as built-in functions. It's one of the standard machine-learning problems.
In short: "Blurring", as most image processing software does it is a convolution (i.e. a multiplication in Fourier-Space) of the original image with a Gaussian kernel. Since the resulting image is real but the multiplication takes place in the full complex Fourier spectrum, information about the original image is lost during the convolution (the blurring): There is no inverse function to the convolution, in general. Nevertheless we can find the most probable original image, given the blurred one and, using knowledge about the struture of the original images (like, say, its Fourier spectrum, its entropy, etc), we can enhance this reconstruction.
Contemporary de-convolution algorithms (they are used in Astronomy, Microscopy, in Digital Cameras and a lot of other places) are much better than a layman would expect. While they can do no mathematical wonders, they definitely can restore amazingly clear images from what looks to the human eye like one big blurry blob.
- The CEO of the national rail system, Hartmut Mehdorn, is a Mechanical Engineer.
- famously, Ron Sommer, the former CEO of Deutsche Telekom (think T-Mobile in the states) is a very gifted Mathematician.
- Dieter Zetsche, the CEO of Daimler Chrysler has a PhD in Engineering (hence "Dr. Z.").
- Ferdinan Piech, the head of Volkswagen, studied mechanical engineering in Zurich and is a grandson of the archetype of the German Engineer, Ferdinand Porsche (who, before anyone corrects me, was, arguably, Czech, Austrian or German).
- Speaking of which, the CEO of Porsche, Wendelin Wiedeking has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering.
The list continues for companies like the chemistry and pharma giant BASF (Jürgen Hambrecht, a chemist), SAP (all its founders, Hasso Plattner, Hans-Werner Hector, Klaus Tschira and Dietmar Hopp are either Physicists or Mathematicians), ThyssenKrupp (Ekkehard Schulz, a mining engineer), Robert Bosch Inc. (Hermann Scholl, an electrical engineer) and so on. Bear in mind we're not talking about people who directed their companies as startups like Microsoft or Apple, but CEOs of companies who already where global players before they joined (or were even born).So, although these people probably qualify more as "leaders" than as managers, it is obviously possible to be a good techie and run a big company at the same time.
Strange. It's not just that Emmy Noether currently seems to be underestimated by the world. It seems this ignorance is actually conserved over time. There must be some symmetry to all of this.
I think I read this data as: Wikipedia has been unblocked in China, but nearly nobody has actually noticed yet. Those that have signed up don't seem to be as active as the older members. Nothing very surprising here.